[Jackie78]

Hi,

I have a lot of MP3 files with embedded cover art, i.e. the Album covered is embedded to the ID3 Tag of the MP3 file.

However, some (but not all) of these files, display a wrong picture, which is neither present in the current folder, nor in the ID3 Tag of this file. Even when I move this file to a comepletely new folder, the wrong image is still displayed.

The strange thing is: when I view that file with another XBMC installation on another computer (same Dharma Version), the correct cover is displayed.

Is there something totally messed up with the cover database, and how can I clean that up?

Edit: after some playing around with MP3Tag (windows program to alter ID3 tags), I found out that this happens when you have several MP3s in your database, that have exactly the same entry in the Artist and Title Tag. XBMC then seems to prefer an image of another file (at a possibly completely other location on my network) over the locally saved image in the MP3 file. This is a bug in my eyes, that needs to be fixed.
It also happens if the previous file doesn't exist anymore. Why does XBMC cache these images at all, instead of reading them from the ID3? I have tried refreshing the database in the XBMC settings, which didn't fix this.

Edit2: After completely deleting my whole database, I found out another interesting fact: When I have songs from the same artist in a folder, XBMC always only takes one of the cover arts. For example, I have a folder with the current Single Charts on my network drive.

These fields in the ID3 tags are filled: Album Name is "Charts", Artist Name is "Blue Eyed poes", and I have two different Titles of that artist. both titles have different(!) images embedded in the ID3 tag field. What does XBMC do? It only reads the image from the first song, and displays it for the second one as well! Severe bug, please have this be fixed.

[jmarshall]

XBMC considers that an album has a single cover, yes. The album is uniquely defined by the Album name and Album artist. It will use the first image found (during a scan or during browsing) for that album for all other songs in the album.

As you'll appreciate, this isn't an issue for the majority of issues. It will be addressed only when the music thumbs move to the new texture cache.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Jackie78]

Hi,

In my eyes, this is indeed a severe issue, since any other of many mediaplayers I tried handles this correctly. All I as for is that Xbmc takes the cover from the actual Mp3 file instead of its database. Why is this so hard to implement?

Concerning what you said about texture cache: what exactly is this, I am not familiar with that concept, can you plz explain?

[paul]

I doubt they will do anything for you with that bad attitude.
As this is free software you have no right to demand anything.
Might i suggest you remove all the embeded thumbs from your .mp3 files
then download the correct album art and name it folder.jpg

This should correct the issue. it did for me

[Jackie78]

Paul, I cannot see what's wrong with my attitude. XBMC and all the developers deserve my deepest respect for performing great work, all I try is to give hints where to improve that piece of software. Sorry for the typos in my previous post, which I typed from my mobile phone.

Concerning your proposed solution, this will not work, because we share different assumptions I guess: You (and XBMC) think of cover art on a album base, but this is not true for many of my MP3s, which actually have a cover art per song (or per file).
The reason is: there are many collections that have no Album name in the ID3 tag, or a common description like "Charts" in the Album field. The problem occurs when an artist with no album entry (empty album entry) or the same album entry has several songs, each with a unique cover art. This is totally intentional. In fact, I think of the cover saved in the database or in a folder.jpg as a backup that should be used if an MP3 has no individual cover saved. Besides, this problem occurs also if the files are located in totally different folders, and do not have any connection other than sharing the same album- and artist name.

If an MP3 contains at least one image (stored in the file directly, with the ID3 tag), then XBMC should please always use the cover art from that file. That's how most mediaplayers handle these files, and that's probably what most users expect to happen. If there is NO image stored in the file, XBMC could look for a jpeg in the same folder (but only there).

[paul]

I noticed you have edited out the bad attitude parts.
My solution certainly does work(or at least it does for me)
As your the only person on the planet with this issue you could supply a patch,
to remidy your problem. and yes i understood your post

[jmarshall]

Why is this so hard to implement?

It's not hard, but I personally am not going to do it as there are other things I would prefer to work on which will remedy this issue in time via alternate means. You're welcome to work on it if you like. See CFileItem::GetCachedMusicThumb() or thereabouts. If you wish to take it on I'm happy to provide pointers.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[yastarabe]

Jackie78 is not the only person on the planet with this issue or request: i have the same wish: read covers embedded on mp3 files.

Mediaportal do it and Winamp also do it.

But unfortunately for me and others, XBMC only reads jpg files found on the same folder of the songs. Excelent behaviour when we have any album of a single author, but wrong when we have an album composed by various artists and each song have their own cover.

Developers, please... it would be nice.

[Roborob]

I also have the same wich for various artists albums to display the embedded coverart in the file. In file mode it looks like it does but not in library mode.

[alain_nissen]

Hi. Sorry to pop up in the middle of the thread, but I've been experiencing exactly the same issue as Jackie78 with my MP3 embedded cover arts. The same behaviour was noticed with WMA and MP4 files, too.

After having read the whole thread here above, I had a deeper look at the ID3v2 specifications. As far as I can see, it isn't specified anywhere that the (optional) front and back cover arts embedded in an MP3 file are related to the Artist-Album couple.

I see 2 reasons for removing this assumption from XBMC:
- some artists release the same album name twice, with different covers, different years and different track lists.
- most artists release several singles from an album and those singles have specific cover arts

These are the reasons why I believe that XBMC-cache should not link any MP3 embedded cover to the Artist-Album couple; instead it should link it to the filename.

A workaround could be to remove all embedded covers from my MP3/WMA/MP4 files, and store the cover image as <filename>.tbn; however, such a workaround would make my MP3/WMA/MP4 files "cover-less" when played with another music player than XBMC.

I've written a patch for XBMC 10.1 which seems to work fine on my Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) boxes -- after having rebuilt the .deb packages and cleaned the whole XBMC cache, of course.

http://users.skynet.be/Alain.Nissen/xbmc...edcoverart

(The patch however cannot be used "as is" on the GIT version, since there have been significant changes in the source code since XBMC 10.1 was released.)

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

-Alain

[xbmc17]

I would have to agree, this is a bug. XBMC does not read the cover per file so this causes it to display incorrect covers (the first one read). As the other poster mentioned no other mediacenter I've tested as this issue. The workaround is to clear all covers embedded in your MP3 files, you're permanently losing them by doing this.

[Jackie78]

I would have to agree, this is a bug. XBMC does not read the cover per file so this causes it to display incorrect covers (the first one read). As the other poster mentioned no other mediacenter I've tested as this issue. The workaround is to clear all covers embedded in your MP3 files, you're permanently losing them by doing this.

+1

[ACE007]

I have the exact same thing going on. I removed the image tag from mp3... reattached. cleaned xbmc library, and it still shows the incorrect album cover... exactly as descrbed by others. hmmm..... That's too bad.

[mindinsomnia]

Put me down as having the same issue!

[alain_nissen]

Dear Jonathan,
Could you please update us on the above issue?
I've upgraded from XBMC version 10 to GIT-20121109 and, as far as I can see, the issue is still present: the cover art embedded in a specific xxx.mp3 file will be displayed for all other .mp3 files that have the same artist name & album name as xxx.mp3 and no embedded cover.
The patch I provided for XBMC 10 cannot be reused for the current version since the music database has been completely redesigned. Do you still plan to fix it soon?
Thanks for your feedback.
Regards,
-Alain