Per track and per album cover

[null]

When displaying album art to represent an album, Poweramp selects a track's album art. The problem comes when the album has per-track artwork. It then chooses the artwork for a single track and uses it to represent the whole album.

The workaround is to not embed per-track artwork but use album-wide artwork. However, having it there really enhances the experience when such artwork is available.

I've been around since sometime during v2. There used to be the option to use in-folder artwork for displaying in the library, so that you could embed whatever artwork you wanted for each track to be displayed in the main screen.

Is there a way to have both, like it used to be? If not, could we have this feature back?

[andrewilley]

Per Track artwork within one Album is displayed individually as long as different images are embedded within each audio file. However if you specify some new artwork (e.g. downloaded from the internet) for any track within an album, that artwork will be applied to viewing of all tracks within that album (this was by user-request a long time ago). PA's menu option for assigning new cover art is named ALBUM Art, not TRACK art.

Andre

[null]

Thanks for your reply. I was asking for the ability to have both though, as previously possible in v2.

Show per track album when displaying tracklist and when in player view, show cover.jpg when in album list.

 

EDIT: unless you mean I have to apply album art individually if I want to have both. Do I really need to do that for each album? God no please

Edited April 22, 2020 by null
ps

[andrewilley]

The current system was implemented by user request, as people didn't want to have to apply their newly downloaded album artwork on a track-by-track basis. It's far more common for a real-world album to have just one cover rather than each track having it's own cover - and to be fair, the menu option in PA does specifically say 'Album Art', not 'Song Art', so that's the behaviour users would expect. Obviously that doesn't apply when an album isn't real but just a collection of songs (folder style) or album info isn't present at all (such as with Single releases). In those cases, you would probably be better embedding any track-by-track artwork into the files in the first place, which is the tidiest long-term solution and one that would survive re-installs, device resets, new purchases, etc.

One solution I could suggest (if @maxmp wants to implement it) would be for the 'Album Art' context submenu dialog box to have an extra tickbox at the top of the image display area saying 'Apply to Entire Album'. That box would be ticked by default (to match current functionality) but could be unticked when desired. Obviously that box would not be displayed where there is no Album Title tag in the file - such as for Singles, as I mentioned earlier.

Andre

[null]

I just want to be able to use the cover.jpg like in v2. It's cool that users want to be able to apply album artwork to all tracks when selected via the UI, but the option to use cover.jpg when available doesn't affect that behaviour at all, so I don't understand why the option was removed.

I don't want to apply track per track artwork using Poweramp, rather, I want Poweramp to display already embedded artwork when displaying a single track and album-wide artwork provided via cover.jpg when displaying the album as a single entry. Again, this has nothing to do with applying album artwork via Poweramp and doesn't affect the rest of the userbase.

Edited April 22, 2020 by null
ps

[andrewilley]

folder.jpg/cover.jpg/etc are still supported - they are technically per folder though, not per album. Make sure that Settings > Album Art > Prefer Downloaded Album Art is not ticked. 

Andre

[null]

3 hours ago, andrewilley said:

folder.jpg/cover.jpg/etc are still supported - they are technically per folder though, not per album. Make sure that Settings > Album Art > Prefer Downloaded Album Art is not ticked. 

I unticked it and deleted the cache, it doesn't work for neither the album view nor the folder view. Both views chose the fifth (?) cover for displaying as the album cover. I don't even know.

@maxmp is this actually supported in Poweramp? I'm having doubts.

 

EDIT:
Actually I don't think I'm being understood.

My phone's folders: 
> Music
>> (a folder for each album artist)
>>> (a folder for each album)
>>>> (every track on the album, track artwork embedded when available)
>>>> cover.jpg (for representing the whole album)

Expected behaviour:
On album list: Display cover.jpg
On folder view: Display cover.jpg
On album tracklist: Display embedded artwork for every track
On main screen: Display embedded artwork for current playing track

Current behaviour:
On album list: Displays a random track's embedded artwork (I don't know how this is selected)
On folder view: Displays a random track's embedded artwork (again, I don't know how this is selected)
On album tracklist: Displays embedded artwork for every track (correct)
On main screen: Displays embedded artwork for current playing track (correct)

I'm not asking for much here. This used to be an option that you had to enable. I don't understand why it was removed.

Edited April 23, 2020 by null
explanation

[maxmp]

@null In-Folder album art is picked after Full Rescan. Manually assigned album art is per Album if album exists. If track is single (no album) - album art is assigned to the track only.

[andrewilley]

2 hours ago, maxmp said:

Manually assigned album art is per Album if album exists. If track is single (no album) - album art is assigned to the track only.

 

23 hours ago, andrewilley said:

One solution I could suggest (if @maxmp wants to implement it) would be for the 'Album Art' context submenu dialog box to have an extra tickbox at the top of the image display area saying 'Apply to Entire Album'.

Any thoughts on this for the future Max? It should be a pretty easy way to allow the user to choose whether to have new/downloaded artwork applied to a whole album (but only if an album tag exists of course) or just the current track, which seems to be something that @null is looking for.

Andre

[andrewilley]

After you have cleared caches you could also check to see that the relevant storage folders in Android/data/_com.maxmpz.audioplayer/ have been emptied, or manually delete contents if you wish. Then do a Full Rescan to pick up any cover.jpg files again.

 

6 hours ago, null said:

Expected behaviour:
On album list: Display cover.jpg
On folder view: Display cover.jpg
On album tracklist: Display embedded artwork for every track
On main screen: Display embedded artwork for current playing track

You are correct in your assumption about folder view: cover.jpg files should be used if present (assuming that option has been enabled in Settings).

In Album song lists and on the main player screen, you should first see track artwork that is embedded in the file, or images that have been auto-downloaded art if no artwork is embedded (again, that auto-download mode is optional in Settings). If you later decide to manually assign some new image via the context menu for a song, as Max has said above, PA will check to see if that track is part of an album, and if it is then the artwork that you chose will subsequently be seen for all tracks in that album. That functionality is as per older user requests from several years back, but hopefully Max might be able to make it optional in future releases?

As far as the Album list using cover.jpg images though, that won't happen. Album view only uses the tags embedded within song files to build up a library what what should be considered as an 'album', an 'artist', etc. Those views have no concept (nor should they) of the folder and subfolder structure that files are stored in, as the user could assign those in any arbitrary manner they happen to want - or even use no folders at all. For example, in my own music collection I mostly do the same as you - Artist folders, with subfolders for each of their Albums, plus a separate Singles folder for individual tracks. Sometimes there will be extra layers though, such as for collections of albums, live material, etc. Also for my Film/TV Soundtracks collection, and for Radio or Stage Shows, there are no Artist folders at all, although there might be layers of collection-level folders to organise the material better for use in Folders modes (e.g. a main folder for all Harry Potter films, for the Doctor Who TV series, for James Bond films, etc, which assorted sub-folders for specific films, TV seasons, official OST releases versus studio-sourced master material, etc). There would be no way to track cover.jpg files across such a user-definable folder system and apply them to an 'Album' concept, only to a 'Folder' view.

Andre

[null]

9 hours ago, andrewilley said:

As far as the Album list using cover.jpg images though, that won't happen.

Why though, it worked perfectly well back in v2 so why not now? I do agree that folder trees are completely arbitrary but everyone puts albums on a single folder when they have lots of them, and you can't tell me otherwise.

[andrewilley]

4 hours ago, null said:

 everyone puts albums on a single folder when they have lots of them, and you can't tell me otherwise.

I mostly do, but remember a lot of people don't create their own folder layouts any more, they leave it up to arbitrary music downloading apps.  I don't recall it working like that on v2 for Albums (only for Folders) but maybe it did, applying folder.jpg/cover.org/etc to all viewing formats for any files that happen to be contained in that folder?

Andre

[null]

@andrewilley Yeah well, those people tend to not download whole albums. And anyway, having this function as an optional setting like it used to be wouldn't affect them anyway.

 

Also I doubt those people would buy Poweramp anyway

EDIT: by the way, having to do a full rescan everytime I add a cover.jpg to my phone is too time-consuming considering it takes like forty minutes (I think. I haven't counted it) and it consumes so many resources that it almost crashes my phone, and if I do anything else on it Poweramp crashes and I have to do it again. Hardly practical at all, even for folder view.

Edited April 23, 2020 by null
ps

[null]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

I don't recall it working like that on v2 for Albums (only for Folders) but maybe it did, applying folder.jpg/cover.org/etc to all viewing formats for any files that happen to be contained in that folder

I didn't read this. Yeah it used to work like this, there used to be an options in the cover options that allowed to always apply cover.jpg to the library view, and the library view only!

Edited April 24, 2020 by null
quote zoom

[Absinthequ]

I believe I understand what you're asking, and it still is possible. It just isn't as easy as it used to be. You're asking for a placeholder when in album list view? 

So look at my example below, I am in artist category,  look at my "2020 B-sides" album:

When I click it, I only have one song in that album,  but as you can see it has a different embedded cover and Poweramp did not select the art from that song. This is how v2 used to behave with cover.jpg or folder.pg

If this is what you're trying to accomplish, you can no longer use the cover.jpg/folder.jpg method, you just have to move that jpg to an internal Poweramp folder and name it correctly.

 So in this example above I place a jpg named "Citizen Cope - 2020 B-sides.jpg" in Poweramp folder "album_art" located @ "android/data/_com.maxmpz.audioplayer/album_art"

the formala is "Artist - Album"

Restart Poweramp it's good to go.

Doing this will create that placeholder jpg for the album, but not affect any of the album art embedded in each song. This is a hack to that feature that used to be present in V2.

Edited April 27, 2020 by Absinthequ

[andrewilley]

I hadn't thought of that, but yes creating (or modifying) the cached image file directly would do the job.  

Andre

[null]

*cries internally*

I don't know that I wanted to know that information. I guess you're right though, that is technically possible.

It isn't a good workaround when you must do it manually several times though.

@maxmp please listen to my cries of help. Even though I really don't *need* this particular feature, this is the kind of feature that made me buy the app in the first place!

[Absinthequ]

On 4/27/2020 at 11:05 PM, null said:

*cries internally*

I don't know that I wanted to know that information. I guess you're right though, that is technically possible.

It isn't a good workaround when you must do it manually several times though.

@maxmp please listen to my cries of help. Even though I really don't *need* this particular feature, this is the kind of feature that made me buy the app in the first place!

This was a feature I used a lot in V2 because if any song in an album was released as a radio single, I embed that singles artwork into that song (if available), and sometimes it's track 1, which caused Poweramp to display the wrong art for the album.

I learned this was still possible as soon as V3 came out so I've been doing it ever since. I have 1113 images in that folder right now.

I also use B-Sides album titles for many artists for non album songs as you can see above. I use a round generic or custom placeholder image so it's easy to distinguish between an album when browsing.

Edited April 29, 2020 by Absinthequ

[null]

Look, I know that it's possible. But just say that you agree with me that being able to use cover.jpg would make your life easier. Because it would, and maybe Max will listen!

I'm not doing that more than three times on my music library though. Too much work.

Anyways I'm not using Poweramp anymore because the scanner either crashes the phone or crashes itself from analysing 10000 tracks. Please fix your app Max. Forum post coming soon

[MotleyG]

2 hours ago, null said:

Anyways I'm not using Poweramp anymore because the scanner either crashes the phone or crashes itself from analysing 10000 tracks. Please fix your app Max. Forum post coming soon

I'm at 25,000+ tracks mixed with mp3, FLAC, and ALAC. Never had the app or scanner crash. All tagged with metadata and covers. Often inside the front cover for what would be "side A" tracks and the back cover for "side B" and they all.show as expected when playing.

I know you are looking for very specific requests, but don't think it is the scanner or app at the current design that are at fault.

G

[null]

32 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

Often inside the front cover for what would be "side A" tracks and the back cover for "side B" and they all.show as expected when playing.

"when playing"

Not what I'm asking for bud. Please read the thread again.

32 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

I'm at 25,000+ tracks mixed with mp3, FLAC, and ALAC. Never had the app or scanner crash.

You could have 100,000+ for all I care. Still, well, it does crash for me. On two phones I have, even. I just did a factory reset on my main phone too. Still doesn't work. I would expect my Nokia 1 to have trouble with my library but not outright crash if I leave the app. Also, I don't expect my Moto E⁵ to crash at all; yet it does, it hogs all resources and locks up my phone, then if I leave the app it is killed, and then it starts scanning again!!! That can only mean it does no checkpoints and that is not good when it has to start again and takes like forty minutes everytime.

Anyways, I'll try again in a little while. Maybe it only happens on the latest version only because this wasn't how it worked before.

Edited April 30, 2020 by null
wonky language

[MotleyG]

1 hour ago, null said:

Not what I'm asking for bud. Please read the thread again.

Read the thread, thanks. Was providing some perspective that the app handles large libraries and on many devices. Never suggested yours specifically wasn't an issue. Same with the artwork, yes when playing. Sorry you aren't getting the answer you are looking for.

[null]

@MotleyG  I'm asking for artwork that displays only on the list of albums in the library (from cover.jpg, like in the days of v2), plus per-track artwork like it is displaying now. Right now when there is per-track artwork, PA chooses a random track and applies that track's embedded cover to the album list. Am I clear? I feel like I have to draw a diagram here e.e

Anyways I can't show pictures because PA can't even finish scanning and it's driving me up the walls... I'm going to make a forum post now...

EDIT: I'm not sure if I sound passive-aggressive here but that's not my intention. I thank you for just replying and acknowledging my problems instead of claiming my tagging is what's causing it and that there's no possible solution. Yes that is me being a little passive aggressive, but not to you, or Max.

Edited April 30, 2020 by null

[andrewilley]

4 hours ago, null said:

I'm not sure if I sound passive-aggressive here but that's not my intention. 

Actually you do seem to be coming over as somewhat aggressive again, never mind passive-aggressive. People here are only trying to help, and Feature Requests can take a while to happen, as you yourself acknowledged a month ago:

On 4/12/2020 at 9:25 PM, null said:

First of all I want to apologize for acting like a baby last time I was here. I'm sorry Max, I really snapped. I feel particularly guilty because my feature request was fulfilled after all. I'm sorry, it won't happen again.

So please can we calm this down, or I will have to shut this thread down or start issuing warnings.

Andre

[null]

@andrewilley I'll try to behave. I'm sorry.