[garrypsmith]

Hi

I am about to import my music collection into XBMC and would appreciate some clarity on how XBMC handles the album artwork.

At present I have a 200x200 version of the album artwork embedded into each music file so that indiviual tracks when played on ipod etc show the artwork. All the tracks for an album are in a seperate folder for that album so I also have a folder.jpg file in there that is a larger 600x600 version of the artwork.

My questions is, when I add the collection into XBMC and it is scanned into the library can I enforce the use of the folder.jpg as the image shown onscreen when playing a track from the album rather than the embedded smaller image? Info in the forum seems to imply that preference is given to the embedded image if present when building the library, is this the case and if so can it be over-ridden?

Many thanks

[joebrady]

here's the wiki page that cover this, http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Thu...Thumbnails

Although it states the order scanned for, I can't remember if the first found or last found take precedence. Not in front of machine to check at the moment. You could try to just scan one item first, with different folder.jpg than embedded artwork, to see the behavior.

[garrypsmith]

Thanks Joe

I had already read the wiki page which is where I had seen reference to the embeded image seeming to have precedence over a folder image.

It states "First, the Tag Reader runs and caches any embedded art using the album name and album artist (or song artist, if that is all that is available)". The rest of the section that shows a code assignment list seems to only apply to the folder thumbnail image not the artwork displayed when playing a track. Even this however seems to pick the cached image from the tag reader as its first choice.

If it's true that embedded artwork will always be picked up and placed in the cache first when the library is scanned, how do you force a .jpg or .tbn image to be used instead?

I want to be able to keep the small image embedded in each file for ipod support but want XBMC to display a larger image on my TV screen.

I was hoping to clarify how to do this before adding any music into the library as there doesn't seem to be a way of clearing out the image from the cache if its not the correct one, or is there a way to do this I am missing?

[jmarshall]

It's changed recently, so in latest master folder.jpg takes priority if all the embedded art is the same (assuming embedded art is available and a single album is in the folder).

[joebrady]

^^The man with the plan^^

I was hoping you'd notice this one and chime in.

[garrypsmith]

Thanks guys

I've tested this and the folder.jpg image does indeed take precedence over the embedded art.

I've actually taken the approach of creating a cover.jpg file alongside folder.jpg as I found that Windows Media Player would overwite the folder.jpg with its own reduced size version of the album image whenever it was fired up, even if folder.jpg was set as readonly!
I've used the <musicthumbs> override option in advancedsettings.xml to tell XBMC to use the cover.jpg file instead of folder.jpg.

One odd thing I did find in my testing was that naming the image folder.tbn (before I took the approach of changeing the <musicthumbs> setting) was having no effect. i.e. the image in folder.jpg was always being used and folder.tbn was ignored. Am I correct in a thinking the initial artwork scan will only check folder.jpg and that folder.tbn is only used as a folder icon image not to create a thumbnail for the album artwork in the cache?

The thumbnail documentation only mentions filename.tbn being checked for not folder.tbn, though there is a reference to a remote folder.tbn check (why only remote?) so is rather vague.

[jmarshall]

folder.tbn is not read at all. <foldername>.tbn (in the parent folder) is.

[ThumbOne]

I've used the <musicthumbs> override option in advancedsettings.xml to tell XBMC to use the cover.jpg file instead of folder.jpg.

Thanks for this. Saved my day. Puzzles me this is in advanced settings and not accessible in the UI under settings. I mean anyone with a sizable audio library has their historic cover art storage and naming convention and it's great that it is configurable anyhow, as like you I'm a cover.jpg user historically not folder.jpg ...

[scott967]

Actually a lot has changed since 2012.  I think many people embed cover art into their files rather than use separate art.

scott s.
.