album art

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25 comments

  • Official comment
    Seppi Evans
    Hi-Res

    Artwork is quite easy once you get the knack of doing it, iTunes unfortunately stores the artwork in a different format and not with the music tracks so does not copy across to other platforms.

    Bluesound works with either a folder.jpg, cover.jpg or embedded artwork. Cover.jpg takes precedence over other artwork. Max 600kb, the optimise artwork setting can help just as long as the artwork is not over 4MB in size. 

    When changing / altering a music file you need to run a rebuild index, from the help menu select diagnostics and Rebuild Index.

    When staring out with artwork its a good idea just to point Bluesound to say at one artist with a few albums so the rebuild index is quick and then you can then attempt bulk editing. Grabbing artwork using Google can work but you need to keep the data size in check and something that has caught me in the past is jpg files which are not jpg but just been renamed at some point and uploaded to the Internet.

     

    I do however suggest you use an application to automate the process, I keep suggesting one called Bliss as it works on many platforms and for me works wonders. It’s very powerful so always a good idea to work on a copy of your music library.

    EDIT: PNG format also works.

  • Neil Coates

    Ive embeddeed a cover.jpg image of the artwork in each of three different files and done an index rebuild. It has only worked on the first album. I then tried Bliss, but was unable to select the NAS drive as it was not selectable in the displayed tree or by navigating . Only music stored on my mac could be seen. Which is not a lot , hence the NAS! Frustrated as album art is an important part of browsing! Any further suggestions?

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  • Seppi Evans
    Hi-Res

    If you use Finder on your Mac you should be able to find / navigate to your NAS and open up your music folders. You could copy across the three offending Albums and try again with Bliss, copying them back when corrected.

    Some NAS devices have a “trash can” and needs to be emptied otherwise you end up seeing old files still.

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  • Neil Coates

    Bliss cannot navigate to the NAS. That is the problem. i can see the NAS using Finder as that is easy!

     

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  • Seppi Evans
    Hi-Res

    In finder If you double click on a NAS shared volume it will mount onto the desktop.

    Now launch Bliss, browse to the “Volumes” folder and the share will be there.

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  • Neil Coates

    ive managed to install the bliss app directly into my NAS and running oit from there. Seems to be working albeit slowly and have purchaed another 250 fixes which should do my collection nicely (I'm really a long term vinyl user!) Thanks for your interest and help!

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  • Dan Gravell

    Thanks for purchasing Neil - if you have any further questions just ask (I'm the lead developer of bliss)!

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  • Jim Speer

    Hello, I have exactly the issues that Neil Coates has. I have been trying to get my album artwork in shape for over a year now. I am playing stored FLAC and MP3 files from a NAS. I have tried embedding artwork into the files themselves (using Yate), I have tried including a poster.jpg and folder.jpg file. I have confirmed that they are jpg files, less than 600k -- most are under 50k. I reindex music collection and only about 60% of the time is it successful. This leaves a lot of albums without artwork. What is preventing me from doing a thorough job? Most frustrating.

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  • Seppi Evans
    Hi-Res

    Remove the poster.jpg files as that’s not a supported format. If you use cover.jpg that will “trump” any other artwork you have added. Reindex is not what you want, you must use Help…Diagnostics…Rebuild Index.

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  • Jim Speer

    Dan Gravell - Bliss looks wonderful! Had I not already paid for the full version of Yate I would give it a try.

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  • Jim Speer

    Seppi Evans - thanks for the suggestions. Alas, I have just tried them, and nothing new has resulted. I made sure that several of the artless folders have a cover.jpg file in them, and then did a complete reindex as you have described. But still those artworks fail to appear. Is there something else I can try?

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  • Seppi Evans
    Hi-Res

    Remove the music share you are using.

    Copy just one album onto a USB memory stick so it’s separate from your library. Strip out all embedded artwork and folder.jpg and cover.jpg

    Plug the USB memory stick into your Bluesound player and it will index and let you play the album with missing artwork.

    Now move the USB back to your Mac and add a cover.jpg but find some random artwork using Google and with preview edit it’s size down, saving it as the cover.jpg on the USB stick.

    Plug it back into your player and you will have the random artwork displayed for the album.

    Don’t use any other tools or any existing artwork you have handy.

    With USB the index is automatically created and trashed on removal so nothing needs to be done on Bluesound.

    If you are still having issue try another controller device such as iOS / Android or even delete the controller and reinstall.

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  • Jim Speer

    So basically the answer is to make an entirely new copy of the albums and re-import them back into Blusound? Will I have to so this for each problem album? That is about 200 albums for me at this point.

     

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  • Seppi Evans
    Hi-Res

    No, I was explaining how to ensure you are able to get artwork for one album and you then understand the possible failure points.

    Once you grasp the basics of getting artwork working it’s easy to scale this up using automated tools.

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  • Jim Speer

    When you say "Remove the music share you are using." does that mean to take the whole NAS out of the library? Or to eject the library? Sorry, not clear on what that means.

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  • Seppi Evans
    Hi-Res

    Yes, delete the existing share… so you your are literally concentrating on one album only.

     

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  • Jim Speer

    Wait, hold the phone! I just figured out a much simpler solution. For problem albums for which the artwork stubbornly refuses to be indexed:

    1. Rename the folder of the album on the server - maybe just add a letter to it
    2. Use a tag editor to change the name of the album for all album tracks - again, maybe just add a letter
    3. Settings -> Music Library -> Reindex

    It works!

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  • Tony W.
    Product Support Manager

    Jim

    3 should be Help, Diagnostics, Rebuild Index in which case, steps 1 and 2 shouldn't be required.

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  • Jim Speer

    Thanks Tony, but bewildering to me, Rebuild Index does not work for me to restore missing artwork. I have no idea why this is. It seems that tricking Bluesound into thinking it's reindexing a new album is the only way to get some artwork to display.

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  • Dan Gravell

    I'm guessing there's some sort of cache that isn't being invalidated...

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  • Adrien Kaulmann

    Hallo to all,

    I have added a bunch of CDs to my NAS on Monday and run into a similar problem. All Album Art is working except for one CD.

    I embed artwork to every track using MacOS Music, watching the size (< 600kb) and pixel size (<601x601). There has never been a problem, but this piece of Artwork will not appear.

    The jpeg is an own scan, as I normally do when I cannot find it elsewhere. I have been reindexing again and again (full reindex), with the optimize artwork option on, with and without a cover.jpg in the folder, reloading artwork, removing the artwork and reassigning it with a tag editor (Bliss, which I have installed on my NAS, and others) but nothing seems to work for this Album. Bliss has shown the Artwork and has not discovered any inconsistencies.

    So far, there always has been a (good) reason when the artwork wasn’t showing up, but this time it is different or at least I could not find the reason.

    Today, I will remove the Album completely and restart recording it from scratch. Will let you know if I was successful 😃.

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  • Adrien Kaulmann

    Hallo again,

    Yes indeed, deleting all information for the CD from NAS and restarting with importing from CD solved the issue. One regular re-index, and the artwork was visible for every track, the album remaining black. Only after closing and reopening the Controller, the artwork became visible for the album.

    So I suppose there was an error when the files were created that BlueSound could not deal with, while other apps could.

    By the way, the "Reload Artwork" button does not seem to work in the MacOS Controller 3.20.5. I either close and reopen the app or I use IOS to do the refresh. 

    I am very happy now, even though, it took a bit more than a day to get things right.

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  • a c

    Deleting and rebuilding the whole database to add one value to one record seems ... questionable. A software engineer proposing such a scheme wouldn't last long.

    Surely bluesound can do better?

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  • Jim Speer

    After literally years of trying everything suggested to me, and still encountering mixed results, I think Dan Gravell's comment about not invalidating a cache above must be correct. I can't think of any other reason why Blusound would be clinging onto otherwise deleted information. As I said above, the only sure fire way for me to get artwork to correctly display is to (a) Do it right the first time, or (b) copy all the album files into a folders with a different name, and tag them with a different album name and band name -- and delete the original. Then a reindex can be tricked into thinking it's indexing a new album.

    Since this is extremely time consuming, I really wish there were an easier way!

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  • Alain DW
    Lossless

    I had a similar problem with m3u playlists. If a >Diagnostics> Rebuild Index doesn't produce the result, try a >Diagnostics>Reboot followed by a Rebuild Index. In my case this solved the issue. It probably takes care of the rogue cache.

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