how to change album art

[Mohammad Hossein]

i have a single album for each artist.
how can i change album art of these single albums ?
as you know PA recoginze albums with album artist and album title
a set of songs that have same album title and aslo same album artist consider as an album
so there is many single album that album title of all of them are 'Single' but album art diffrents. so propably it could be possible to change album art for each of them
can you help please ?

[andrewilley]

Have you got both the Artist and Album Artist tags set to the actual artist/band's name, and the Album name set to "Single". That ought to do it. Or you could simply leave the Album Artist tag empty.

Andre

[Mohammad Hossein]

i could not unserstand what you said
just imagine this
there is an album that each track have own image
PA randomly choosed one of them for album art. i want chane it to what i want.

[MotleyG]

1 hour ago, Mohammad Hossein said:

i could not unserstand what you said
just imagine this
there is an album that each track have own image
PA randomly choosed one of them for album art. i want chane it to what i want.

The concept of a traditional album would only have one cover. This goes back to the same issue you explained in a previous thread. One album, one cover.

For these more Complex things you are trying to achieve you may be better off using a proper tag editor program on a PC. I can recommend mp3tag, there are others available. These are specifically designed to take care of tagging details. Poweramp is a player. 

[andrewilley]

@Mohammad Hossein  Ah, that's not what you said in your (slightly muddled, translation issue?) first post. You mentioned having a "single album for each artist" and "album title of all of them are 'Single' ", from which I presumed meant you had defined an imaginary album called 'Single' in which to keep any singles released by each artist that are not also on their albums.

Instead, you now ask about individual tracks on an album with different artwork. That is allowed if each song file contains its own embedded image. However if you do later decide to override the Album artwork with one new image, the new album cover will be applied to all of the tracks in that album - as it is an ALBUM image, not a song image.

If you have done it by accident, you can only revert back to the individual song images by deleting the cached album cover image from the data folder, as if you try it in the app you'll just replace the current overall  image with another one.

For details of where to find the album cover image file to delete, see: 

 

There is a Feature Request to allow more flexibility in this facility, to vote for it please see:

Andre

[Mohammad Hossein]

12 hours ago, MotleyG said:

The concept of a traditional album would only have one cover. This goes back to the same issue you explained in a previous thread. One album, one cover.

For these more Complex things you are trying to achieve you may be better off using a proper tag editor program on a PC. I can recommend mp3tag, there are others available. These are specifically designed to take care of tagging details. Poweramp is a player. 

im not agree. :))

one album one album artist

but not for one album one cover

[Mohammad Hossein]

@andrewilley yes probably translation issues.

i meant every artist has an album named 'Single' that include single tracks.

even if you leave album title empty, PA categorize those songs into Unknown Album.

i wanted to change these album for artist.

what why i told about single album and .. ? why i did not say i want to change an album image with custom image?

in other topic i saw someone wanted to do this and the solution was make a jpg and rename it to your album name and put it to data/..../album folder.

but in my case all of these albums name are 'Single'. so i cant do this.

 

[andrewilley]

OK, I think was I right in how I first interpreted your question then.

So for each artist/band in your music library, you have some songs that are part of regular multi-track albums, and a few other songs that should be treated as 'singles' - i.e. stand-alone songs that are not in any album.

I would assign the tags for these individual songs as follows:

Title: <individual song name>
Artist: <artist name>
Album: Single
Album Artist: <artist name, same as in 'Artist' tag>

When you view that Artist's page in Poweramp, you will see all their regular albums plus an extra entry called 'Singles' containing the individual tracks. The "album" cover image will be picked from one of the contained songs.

You can also manually assign a new album cover image to it by long-pressing on the Singles item in the list and selecting 'Image'. Once chosen, any new cover image will be applied to that artist's Singles "album" - meaning the overall album and all of its contained songs (as they are all considered as being of one "album"). You can do that separately for each individual artist's own Singles collection. The chosen images will be stored in the com.maxmpz.audioplayer files folder, inside the subfolder "selected_aa", with the filename "<artist name> - Single".

As I said earlier, there is an existing Feature Request to allow detaching individual song artwork from newly downloaded Album Cover artwork, but currently the act of assigned a new Album Cover will apply it to the whole album.  

Andre

[andrewilley]

Actually, thinking about it, there is one way that you can separate individual track artwork from overall album cover art, and that's if the Artist and Album Artist tags differ. So for example:

Title: <individual song name>
Artist: <artist name>
Album: Single
Album Artist: <artist name> ; Single

The first tag would change for each song, but the last three would remain identical for every song in that artist's singles collection.

The Album Artist category would gain an extra overarching artist name called "Single", but that's no great hardship.

Andre

[Mohammad Hossein]

i tried "<artist name> - Single.jpg" to selected aa. as you said it changes album art but it apply it for all of them

and the second way is really annoying.

i dont want use another specefic jpg for album, i just want instead of randomly choice between tracks, PA choose that what i want.

what if i remove all of Single Tracks, then in firat add that i want consider as album art, then rescan, PA should use that only one as its art, then add other ones?

re you thing this works ?

[andrewilley]

2 hours ago, Mohammad Hossein said:

i dont want use another specefic jpg for album, i just want instead of randomly choice between tracks, PA choose that what i want.

what if i remove all of Single Tracks, then in firat add that i want consider as album art, then rescan, PA should use that only one as its art, then add other ones?

You keep changing what you are asking for. Do you want the first line above, or the second?

(1) If you want the first request above, i.e. that you don't want one specific artwork but you want it to change randomly each time you use it, then no you can't do that. PA will pick a song randomly (well randomly to us, it's down to what underlying order the directory crawl presents) and use that artwork for the overall album too.

(2) You could try the method you describe, but it will depend on how the directory structure is laid out at a system level (which you have no control over). Creating a new empty folder, and adding just one song into it, followed by a Full Rescan, might have the desired result even when you add more files to it. But next time you have to new a new rescan, it might lose what you set up.

If you do want a permanent album image, then give my other suggestion a try as you are clearly able to edit your tags to suit your needs. An example which I've just tested using a few ABBA singles could be:

Title: Casandra
Artist: ABBA
Album: Single
Album Artist: ABBA ; Single

Title: Fernando
Artist: ABBA
Album: Single
Album Artist: ABBA ; Single

Title: Summer Night City
Artist: ABBA
Album: Single
Album Artist: ABBA ; Single

Title: The Day Before You Came
Artist: ABBA
Album: Single
Album Artist: ABBA ; Single

That structure will allow you to organise your songs exactly the way you want. However rather than just accepting the image that PA picks, you'll also be able to apply your own selection of image for the overall album (from online or locally) without affecting any of the individual songs. The image would be saved in the cached folder as "ABBA _ Single - Single.jpg", so it should be permanent.

'Artist' Category view, drilled down to see ABBA, showing the "fake album" called 'Single':

And then drilled down again into that 'Single' album. Note there is different artwork for each track (two were embedded in the files, two were auto-downloaded by PA) plus there's an independent overall cover artwork too (which I applied in Poweramp at the Artist>Album view level):

 

Andre

[ihaspei]

or an easily fix to his problem could be name the album as the song title, like it does on all paltforms, so you won't have that album cover problem.

it would be nice if on some future updates Poweramp detects every song without an album tag as a single and just automatically use the song title as the album name. so that will fix having the same album cover for those songs without that album tag.

but obviously that's not a "necessary" feature because you could easily do it while adding the tags anyway.

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, ihaspei said:

it would be nice if on some future updates Poweramp detects every song without an album tag as a single and just automatically use the song title as the album name.

Not really a good idea at all. For example I have about 1,300 songs in my singles collection, and your suggestion would create 1,300 false "albums" making navigation a nightmare.

For empty Album tags, it's much better to just do what happens at the moment and put them into an "Unknown Album" entry. Which I've always felt should be placed at the start or end of Category lists by the way, it seems rather non-intuitive to hide it under "U" in the Albums category.

But I still believe the best solution is to modify the Album name tag to "Single" or similar, so they are all organised tidily. 

Andre

[MotleyG]

19 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

For empty Album tags, it's much better to just do what happens at the moment and put them into an "Unknown Album" entry. Which I've always felt should be placed at the start or end of Category lists by the way, it seems rather non-intuitive to hide it under "U" in the Albums category.

I agree and suggested this a long time ago. Is it on the voting list?

[andrewilley]

@MotleyG it is, yes.

It was also on a list of about 15-20 "low hanging fruit" requests that I put together a while back - all minor-ish stuff that could be coded pretty quickly, but which would fulfil quite a number of long-standing user requests with relatively little time and effort needed.

I think Max has moved away from the idea of small regular incremental updates though, in favour of the new more major Feature Pack project instead.

Andre

[MotleyG]

18 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

I think Max has moved away from the idea of small regular incremental updates though, in favour of the new more major Feature Pack project instead.

That's fine with me. Probably better for his sanity too. Plus it will deliver more complete updates this way.

For those that want instant gratification with a la carte updates will have to get used to it.

[ihaspei]

4 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Not really a good idea at all. For example I have about 1,300 songs in my singles collection, and your suggestion would create 1,300 false "albums" making navigation a nightmare.

so maybe create a new category called "singles" would be better. where every song without an album tag would be there.

and when you go to an artist it separate albums and singles, something like youtube music.

 

[MotleyG]

1 hour ago, ihaspei said:

so maybe create a new category called "singles" would be better. where every song without an album tag would be there.

and when you go to an artist it separate albums and singles, something like youtube music.

This would be better suited to handle if/when Poweramp gets a Smart Playlist function where you could specify what fields and values you wanted to use as criteria. That would be ideal instead of hard-coding in these one-off cases.