Wrong with track in album

[RBEmerson]

I have an album titled "Gypsy Soul", genre "Flamenco" (Narada label - Nuevo Flamenco collection, probably out of print, but worth looking for). The album art is correct, and all tracks, except one, have the album art, which is correct. The track "Mediterranean Sundance", Artist "Al Di Meola" defaults to the original album's artwork, not the "Gypsy Soul" album it's in. The album and genre tags are right. 

As an experiment, I changed the artist to "Armik" and the title to something in Spanish. Same file, different artist, track name, and got the right artwork. 

Change back to the right artist and title and... Wrong artwork. 

Why and how do I fix it? 

[andrewilley]

Sounds like you are using the auto-download feature, which will send the track title and artist name (or the album artist) to a search engine and then uses whatever gets returned as the best match. This is not 100% reliable of course, and very much depends on the quality of the search engine. You can also long-press on any album art in the player screen and choose 'Album Art', then manually pick artwork - either from a wider list of searched possibilities, or manually from your gallery.

The best solution though is for all your audio files to have the correct artwork embedded internally as 'metadata' in the first place, then you don't need to rely on web sourced images at all. A good resource for finding decent quality images is albumartexchange.com, and then you can paste a suitable image into all of the necessary files with a batch tag editor (such as MP3Tag or Tagscanner on a PC). 

Andre

[RBEmerson]

I'm relying on whatever engine Poweramp uses. Its guesses are sometimes ...um... memorable. 

If I download from albumartexchange, can I assume I can "tell" PA to use the file for albums PA got wrong?

[MotleyG]

1 hour ago, RBEmerson said:

I'm relying on whatever engine Poweramp uses. Its guesses are sometimes ...um... memorable. 

If I download from albumartexchange, can I assume I can "tell" PA to use the file for albums PA got wrong?

If you want a predictable cover, always download and embed with your files. It sounds like you also need to add AlbumArtist to your tags for better Album accuracy.

[andrewilley]

I think we've been here before... https://forum.powerampapp.com/topic/19503-in-playlist-album-art-missing 

As we said in that previous thread, the best solution by far is to use a separate batch tag editor program and manually insert images of your own choosing into the actual audio files (the MP3, FLAC, etc files). I often download mine from albumartexchange as that seems to have a good selection, but you can also try plain Googling, or Amazon product images are often quite decent too. It's a bit of a laborious process in the first place if you've got a lot of individual files that don't already have images (although it's quicker if you can save whole albums of files at a time) but once done you can forget about it.

The auto-search feature tries its best, but it can only be as reliable as any other internet search and relies on the names it is given to work with:

The auto-downloaded images are cached in Android/data/_com.maxmpz.audioplayer/album_art/ (or Android/data/com.maxmpz.audioplayer/files/album_art/ for more recent versions of Android). You can manually change these JPEG files if you like - for example copy the good image several times, so it overwrites any pictures you don't like - and next time you start Poweramp it will pick up the updated artwork.

Check your file tags too - long-press on the song title and tap 'Info/Tags'. The song which displays differently from the others in the same album might have some difference in the tag contents?

Andre

[RBEmerson]

The images of Al Di Meola leaning on a Les Paul guitar are the most common returns. 

The  number of tracks on my phone... I don't even want think about it. A handful of albums are filled with tracks ripped from streamed sources (oh for the good old days when that was free and easy to do!). The 80's material alone is about 9K of tracks, albeit 3-5 minutes each. 

The notion of five figures worth of tracks filled with the same artwork repeated LOTS of times would pound the daylights out of storage space. There's got to be a better way than repeating the file over and over.

Does diving into the Android/data structure and putting a needed JPG in the right offer a solution for "one artwork for all tracks in an album"? If so, that also offers the option flush out unwanted artwork. 

[MotleyG]

14 minutes ago, RBEmerson said:

The  number of tracks on my phone... I don't even want think about it. A handful of albums are filled with tracks ripped from streamed sources (oh for the good old days when that was free and easy to do!). The 80's material alone is about 9K of tracks, albeit 3-5 minutes each. 

The notion of five figures worth of tracks filled with the same artwork repeated LOTS of times would pound the daylights out of storage space. There's got to be a better way than repeating the file over and over.

Compared to the file size of even just ok quality audio files, an image size of 600x600 doesn’t generally take much more space and will look fine on a phone display. There are plenty of desktop apps that will do this in a somewhat automated way, similar to Poweramp. You may need to replace a few, but after that they are there permanently.

[andrewilley]

The images are going to be stored on your device anyway - whether you embed them within the audio file for perpetuity, or if PA auto-downloads a JPEG from the internet and stores it in its cached album_art folder. Downloading is always going to be a bit of a black art as the exact wording in the tags will possibly vary from file to file. As you can see from the "Al Di Meola leaning on a Les Paul guitar" pictures, they are all subtly different - sources, sizes, filenames, colour tint, cropping, etc - so how is Poweramp meant to choose exactly which one you want each time you access a new song? Cover image downloads only occur when you first access a song - such as showing it in a library view, or it gets played. PA doesn't go off and pre-download 10,000 images as soon as the files are scanned into the library.

Have a look in that album_art folder to get an idea of the filename format. You can also check in selected_aa, which is where images that you have manually chosen from PA's Album Art menu option are stored. The naming convention is basically "TrackArtistName - AlbumName.jpg", with most special characters (brackets, ampersand, etc) replaced with underscores. There are variants for when tags are missing, such as "TrackArtistName - TrackTitle.jpg" or just "TrackTitle.jpg".

Basically you have a number of choices:
1) Embed your images in the files
2) Allow PA to use the tags it find in the files (or even filenames, if there are no tags) to look for the best match on the internet
3) Manually pick an image for an album (either from a downloaded selection, or from your device's gallery). This may be overriden by existing images for specific songs.
4) Edit the source cached JPEG files by hand in the com.maxmpz.audioplayer folder hierarchy.
4) Use in-folder images (only helpful if you browse by folders, rather than by artists/albums/etc)

Andre

[RBEmerson]

My question is "What is the best way ensure the same artwork for all album tracks without embedding the same item in each track's file?"

It's obvious using the tags or filename is giving the wrong result too many times. Installing the right artwork once per album, knowing each track will show the same artwork - that's what I'm trying to do while using the least amount of storage.

[andrewilley]

@RBEmerson  As said above, there is no one 'right' answer.

Well, there is, but you don't want to do it.

Of the five specific suggestions that I already posted for you a few hours ago, I would say (3) is the easiest. As long as the Album Title and the Artist tags match between songs, the chosen image will flow to other songs in that same album too. The flow-through to other songs does not use Album Artist tags though, presumably so you can change the artwork for individual songs within collections more easily?

@maxmp Did you think any further on my suggestion to add a tickbox to the Album Art selector screen, so the user could decide whether they want the new image to flow to other songs with Album & AlbumArtist matches, or if they want to  apply it to just the current song? Would probably make more sense than matching by Track Artist.

Andre

[RBEmerson]

Sorry - total brain burp on my part - 3's the winner.