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2013-11-19, 18:18
(This post was last modified: 2013-11-19, 18:22 by awilliam.)
When I scrape my music library the status message shows that it is loading info from local files (can't recall the exact wording right now).
I have all of my album covers (600x600px) saved in the following style:
Music > Artist > Album > Album.tbn
Music > Artist > Album2 > Album2.tbn etc
From what I've read, .tbn is the preferred format to save the thumbnails, I'm currently using Frodo 12.2. Only problem is that when I had to re-scrape my library, the thumbnails that display in XBMC are low-quality and must be getting pulled from the Internet. When I manually change the artwork and point to the local .tbns the correct thumbnail loads properly but doing this for every single entry is too tedious to undertake.
Is my file structure correct? Also, will .tbn continue to be the preferred method of saving thumbnails in Gotham? Or can I use .jpg? Might save me some headache in the future
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2013-11-20, 02:41
(This post was last modified: 2013-11-20, 02:44 by scott967.)
Well, first off, for me the "thumbnail" entry in the Wiki is hard to follow and seems incomplete (can't find anything there on music artist thumbnails for example).
But to your question, .tbn is not "preferred". I'm not 100% sure the usage order as shown in the Wiki is still correct for Frodo v12, and IIUC when the order says "remote" what that really means is a locally stored file (which can be on the same machine or via any shared file mechanism).
I only use .jpg file format for my convenience. .png would also work just fine.
First priority is embedded image (that is contained within the music song file), and it seems like Frodo will select an embedded image set as "cover" in the music file, though it maybe it just grabs the first one.
If it can't find an embedded image it will look for filename.jpg where filename is the actual filename of the individual song without extension).
But in your setup, which is probably what 99.9% of users follow, where all file within the folder are part of a single album, you can use a single file folder.jpg (that exact name, NOT the name of the album folder!) and it will be used for all the files in that folder album (with added benefit that if you use file view instead of library view folder.jpg will also be used as the folder icon). If for some reason you don't like folder.jpg, you can use advancedsettings.xml to set a different name to be used. In your setup you have the option of also including folder.jpg and fanart.jpg in the artist folder and those should be used as well (if folder name is the same as the album artist name).
At least that's how I think it works.
scott s.
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Thanks for the reply Scott. I do remember looking through the WIKI too and not finding much info regarding album thumbnails, who knows where I got the info about .tbn being preferred.
If you believe the embedded image takes priority, that too is strange because I use the same file, only in .jpg instead of .tbn, to assign the same artwork to the album in my iTunes library. To my understanding, this embeds the image to the .mp3, no?
So if all of my albums already have this embedded artwork as well as the .tbn copy lying in the artist folder, why would it still be grabbing the image from (what I believe to be) the Internet since it definitely does not display in high quality?
Anybody else ever have an issue assigning album artwork or can confirm what Scott was saying above?
Looking forward to finding out the correct method
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iTunes does not embed art in the files by default.
Embedded art only takes priority if there's more than one art file found per album. If a single piece of art is found, then folder.jpg has priority.
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What software to you use to embed your albums with the cover art?
