[wildonrio]

I transferred all of my music over and ran a scan for album art and many of them defaulted to album artwork by, in my case, a singer named "Teddy Geiger". I'm sure this is different for each person having this problem. How can I make my missing artwork just be the simple music note or whatever it's supposed to be?

[jmarshall]

"ran a scan for album art" means what exactly? Did you just scan your music in to the library, or did you run an album information scan on each album that was already in your library?

I suspect you have a lot of music in one folder, and that folder has been designated as having this artwork, which is why you are seeing this problem perhaps?

Alternatively, you may have little or not tagging in your music, which means it's managed to cache an image for "unknown album by unknown artist" thus showing it for lots of stuff that meets that criteria.

The more information you can give, the easier it will be to determine the cause of, and resolution to your problem.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[wildonrio]

Ok, here is what I think is happening. I am transferring all of my music from my hard drive to xbmc, including all of the hidden album artwork files. When I look at my music in xbmc, everything looks good, except there is obviously a repeated incorrect album artwork for many files. When I look closely at the files that have the repeated incorrect artwork, it's all of the files that had been missing album artwork.

So it looks like xbmc has some sort of system for filling in missing album artwork and I can't tell what it is. At first, it filled in all my missing album artwork with the album artwork for the artist Teddy Geiger. As a test, I removed all my music and thumbnails from xbmc, turned to my computer, found the artwork file for Teddy Geiger, deleted it, and then transferred all my music back over to xbmc and looked at what it did for the songs with missing artwork. Without the Teddy Geiger artwork file, it defaulted to a different album artwork file, this time the soundtrack to the movie UHF.

What is xbmc's system for filling in missing album artwork? Instead of a simple square with a music note, it is picking a random album artwork file and applying to all the songs without album artwork files associated with them? If I delete this UHF soundtrack album artwork file, I'm sure xbmc will just pick another one to use as the default missing artwork file.

What do you think?

[althekiller]

Can you give a detailed description of your directory structure/organization if any?

[wildonrio]

Can you give a detailed description of your directory structure/organization if any?

It's just F:\Music, all my music files and artwork files are in the same directory. I don't have any folders for each artist or anything.

[sho]

XBMC expects a certain structure, at least that each album has it's own folder.

Ordnung muss sein!

[wildonrio]

So I have to separate all my songs into folders based on albums for it to not give wrong album artwork for songs that are missing album artwork?

This seems like a pretty big bug, I bet there are lots of people that don't separate their music into folders...

[sho]

You think?
Perhaps in 1999

[jmarshall]

XBMC caches thumbs based on albumname and artistname.

I suspect your problem is that the album thumb has been cached as the folder thumb. Any tracks within the folder thus inherit this thumb.

Could you detail:
1. Whether or not said tracks have anything set in their artist and album tracks.
2. Whether or not you scanned the tracks in to the library, or just rely on filemode.
3. If you scanned your tracks in to the library, did the problem only pop up once you'd done so? Had you browsed your music beforehand?

Cheers,
Jonathan

[wildonrio]

XBMC caches thumbs based on albumname and artistname.

I suspect your problem is that the album thumb has been cached as the folder thumb. Any tracks within the folder thus inherit this thumb.

Could you detail:
1. Whether or not said tracks have anything set in their artist and album tracks.
2. Whether or not you scanned the tracks in to the library, or just rely on filemode.
3. If you scanned your tracks in to the library, did the problem only pop up once you'd done so? Had you browsed your music beforehand?

Cheers,
Jonathan

Thank you so much for your help! I think I have finally figured out all of XBMC except for this one thing.

1. Yes, all my mp3s have correct ID3 tags, including artist and album info.
2. Yes, all the mp3s are scanned into the library.
3. No, I had not browsed my music beforehand. I scanned them all in right away. I have since deleted everything, FTPed them all back on, and scanned again. Same thing. If I manually delete the album artwork file for the album that is displaying for all my songs that had been missing artwork file, then XBMC picks a new random album cover for them all. It's always the exact same album for all of them too.

By the way, do you know a program that finds all the missing album artwork? I've used iTunes but iTunes makes its own directory for the artwork, I need a program that finds the artwork by making the hidden system files that it puts in the same directory as the file, with the naming format like this: "AlbumArt_{04D5DBFB-845C-4E55-88C1-10CE.jpg"

Thanks again.

[jmarshall]

Right, well, as far as I can tell from the code, this can only happen one of two ways:

1. Album and Artist tags are missing, and a thumb is cached for the missing ones.

2. A folder.jpg file is cached for some reason (no idea WHY this would occur, it's definitely not in the scanner, but might be in the tag readers) and songs inherit from this.

2 is sounding like the more realistic option. Perhaps you could assemble a small set of files (eg 3 or so) and check whether it occurs with these. If it does, upload them (megaupload or similar) for us to test with.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[wildonrio]

Right, well, as far as I can tell from the code, this can only happen one of two ways:

1. Album and Artist tags are missing, and a thumb is cached for the missing ones.

2. A folder.jpg file is cached for some reason (no idea WHY this would occur, it's definitely not in the scanner, but might be in the tag readers) and songs inherit from this.

2 is sounding like the more realistic option. Perhaps you could assemble a small set of files (eg 3 or so) and check whether it occurs with these. If it does, upload them (megaupload or similar) for us to test with.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Ok, it was number 2. There was a folders.jpg file with the artwork in it, I deleted that. I'm almost positive this will fix it, but I can' see until I get home tonight.

Now tell me, as far as the missing artwork, can XBMC automatically download missing album artwork and embed it into each mp3 file? Or do I need to use a third party program in Windows and then transfer the music back over?

[jmarshall]

It can download artwork, but will not embed anything. XBMC does not write audio tags at all.

[schmoko]

Sorry to bring up an ancient thread, but I'm having the same issue. I've deleted all jp[e]*g from the folder, but I still see the same dumb thumbnail for any unknown artists.

Were you ever able to solve this?