Low Quality Song Covers and Artist Images in Poweramp app

[Baba]

Poweramp version: v3-build-839-bundle-play (Full Version)

Device name/model: Samsung Galaxy M12 (SM-N127G)

Android version: 11

I've noticed that all my album art and artist images are being displayed in Poweramp at a lower quality than what they actually are. At first I thought this was an issue with the photos, but after checking them in both Otto Music and Google's Photos app the images seem fine. I've tried clearing the cache, reinstalling, embedding the artwork, but nothing seems to fix it.

Here are a few screenshots depicting the low quality art from Poweramp, and the original quality (Otto Music, Google Photos App):

Poweramp Screenshot

Oto Music Screenshot

Google Photos Screenshot

 

Note : Didn't add the images in the post itself as i couldn't find the option to do it other than via a url.

 

[Baba]

Oh and i don't know if this is a custom ROM as this has been since i bought the phone but the phone has One UI Core Version 3.1

[andrewilley]

Do you have High-Res and Increase Resolution enabled in Settings=>Album Art ? Are we talking about embedded artwork or downloaded or separate file images?

Sometimes the amount of spare RAM assigned to the app can be lower than ideal on some lower-end devices, @maxmp should be able to say whether that is the case here though.

Andre

[Baba]

Hello, first of all thanks for the fast response.

I just woke up and checked Poweramp again and turns out all the album covers magically became better. I have absolutely no clue how this happened though. The only thing I'd done before sleeping is cleaning the cache of Poweramp (which I'd done before too to no avail), and removing all apps from the recent app list.

The album who's photo I'd shown still had this issue though. I changed its cover to a 3000x3000 cover using Musicolet, cleaned the Poweramp cache and ran a full rescan in Poweramp which solved the issue for this album too.

I had both of the settings on, and this issue seemed to be with all types of covers(embedded, downloaded, seperate files).

The issue with the artist images still remains though sadly. I have photos from the range of 200 KB to 28 MB and they all look lower quality than the original photo. Links to screenshots below as can't post in proper quality here. The original photo is in 4018x4018 resolution and its size is 10 MB

Google Photos app

 

Poweramp

[Baba]

I just checked in the artist cache folder and the photo I'm talking about here was downgraded from 10 MB to 105 kB 😭

I removed that photo from the cache folder, replaced it with the original photo, renamed it to the artist name and Poweramp still downgraded it in the app. The only difference is that it isn't downgraded in the cache folder itself now.

[andrewilley]

Those images are excessively large, and may be exceeding the available memory on your device. Image files for example should not exceed 4MB. Embedded art can be larger than that (but why?) but whether it can be processed accurately depends on available memory.

Andre

[Baba]

I've checked the artist images that were less than 4 MB (i checked upto 117 KB sized photos) and all of them were compressed to less than 100 KB. Even the ones that were like 117 KB were compressed to ~50 KB. My phone's memory is 6 GB.

[andrewilley]

I've checked my artist_art folder (the cache for auto-downloads) and selected_artist (for artist images selected manually in PA) and the largest JPG file in there is 2.24MB, about 1500x1500, while the smallest is 20KB. Where you say the files were compressed to less than 100KB, where are you seeing those files?  

Andre

[Baba]

I checked in selected_artist for the artist images and all the images have been downscaled to 512x512 (except those that were already 500x500; even ~6000x6000 files were converted to 512x512 files)

[andrewilley]

I don't often manually choose artist images, so only have three files in selected_artist - the largest is 1200x630 236Kb, then 1000x1000 178KB, and finally a tiddly thumbnail 297x300 16KB. So they do appear to be original downloaded sizes. I just downloaded a new artist image in PA to test this, and a 1647x2048 828K online image was saved correctly into selected_artist.

I also looked down through the Artists list (not something I do very often) allowing it to automatically fill in any missing artist images as I scrolled. Checking the artist_art folder afterwards there were assorted image sizes amongst the newly saved files, the largest being about 980Kb, 1404x1404. Most were in the 150Kb-400Kb range, with a few larger or smaller. The largest I noticed on a quick check was 1536x1536, which I think is the highest resolution PA usually pulls down from its online sources (i.e. three times 512x512).

Andre

[Baba]

I converted a 8 MB artist image to res - 1500x1500 (725 KB), 1440x1440 (671 KB) and 1400x1400 (639 KB), used them all one by one and every time Poweramp automatically converted the photo to 1024x1024. I really don't understand what's going on with Poweramp.

[andrewilley]

I'll try making some local gallery images, I've only used downloads before, which seem to be working fine.

[Edit]

Yes, I see the same as you when using locally stored files for Artist images - specifically I tried 600, 1000, 1200 and 1500 pixel (all saved as clean JPG 'web' images in Photoshop, so without any extra thumbnail or IPTC data, etc). Any file beyond a resolution of 1024x1024 gets reduced to 1024x1024 when copied into PA's selected_artist folder. Even lower resolution images are re-encoded, resulting in slightly smaller file sizes, which can't be helping their quality.  

The same appears to be happening when local JPG files are chosen as album cover images - when they get copied into selected_aa they also get scaled down to a maximum of 1024x1024.

I've never noticed this before as if I am going to the bother of manually curating / creating a specific JPG cover file (rather than letting PA find one online for me) I would just embed it directly into the audio file so it's always available.

Andre

[Baba]

Yeah i also just embed the photo in the audio file instead of letting it stay in the folder. Though i still think that if we're using a photo in the folder without directly embedding it, it shouldn't get compressed a lot because most people use that photo to save space. Like, they would have a single high quality photo in the folder rather than embedding it to each file. This space quickly adds up when the photos you're using are 5 MB or more than that. I'd like there to be a option for this too.

 

Regarding the artist photo, can you look into it? It's weird that a ~6000x6000 photo would get converted to a 512x512 photo if it has any data in it but would get converted to a 1024x1024 if there's no data (at least from what I've experienced this is what happens). There should a option for high quality artist photo too i think 🤔

 

Kindly see to it if any of these features can be implemented. Should I make a post about it in the feature request area?