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Album Art Primer


blheems

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I want my album art when I listen to Dire Straits. I got most of this info from a previous post that I can not seem to find again (bad topic title?). I thought I'd put it into a new post along with what I think I've learned about art for comment. Please correct or expand any of the info. It seems that this info applies to both the play and web versions of Poweramp (PA) although there might be some differences.

There are two main and one minor types of art. I am going to call them player, thumb, and micro art. The player and micro art are located in folders in the folder at:

Android\data\_com.maxmpz.audioplayer

Player Art

This art is shown on the main player screen. I don't know if there are maximum or minimum sizes for this art. The art is located in two sub folders on your system:

album_art

selected_aa

The album_art folder contains the art that PA finds automatically. The selected_aa folder contains art that you manually select. It seems that if both folders contain art for an album then the selected_aa image is displayed. I have been able to move art from the selected_aa folder to the album_art folder and have good results.

The general form of the title of this art is:

artist - album.jpg

For example:

Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms.jpg

The art can also refer to a single song instead of an entire album but I'm going to leave that for another day. Actually I've cleaned that all up on my system and I don't want to mess it back up just to test it.

Thumb Art

These are the albumart.pamp files located in the music folders. They show up as thumbnails when you list the folders in PA and also at the top of the folder song listing. They are created automatically from the Player Art by PA.

These files can be a problem to get rid of if you get the wrong one attached to a folder. I think the problem is with the Android buffer not PA but they seem to have a life of their own at times. The way I have had sucess killing a bad Thumb Art file is:

Edited 10/22/14

A. Get the correct Player Art working.

B. Turn off the phone.

C. Turn on the phone.

D. Delete the bad albumart.pamp file using File Explorer.

E. Turn off the phone.

F. Turn on the phone.

G. Start PA and let it recreate the albumart.pamp file (just play a song from the album).

End Edit

Micro Art

This art is located in a sub folder under the Android\.....\...player folder. I have no idea what this art is nor what it is used for. I've been able to clean up my art world without worrying about this art. But it is there and I figured I should say something. If someone knows more about this art, please comment.

Final Notes:

I am using PA on two phones. In general I have the same music on both phones. I am able to straighten out the art on one phone and then copy the entire Android\.....\...player folder from one phone to the other and have the art be good on the second phone. I always do that from a clean boot before I start PA.

Best of luck,

Brian

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  • 5 months later...

I'm using Poweramp (paid version) on a Nexus 5 and a lot of my "Thumb" art in album view (grid or list) is incorrect. I tried to follow your steps to change it, but no such luck. I can get the HQ art in Player view mostly good (based on the images that are returned when searched - not always perfect), but why doesn't that overwrite the folder images? I'm still stuck with incorrect images on most albums. To rectify this, I downloaded Album Art Grabber from the Google Play Store and used it to acquire all the correct images. They appear fine when I use Google Play Music, but I'd rather use Poweramp, and those images won't appear, even after clearing the data through Settings->Apps on my phone. This seems like an incredibly basic thing, but it's driving me nuts! If I can get it to work with the free music app that came with my phone, why won't it work on Poweramp? Please help!

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OK, I think I might know what is happening to you. First, I put a second reboot into the list but that is not YOUR problem.

I THINK what happened goes SOMETHING like this:

1. You put a new album into PA and had PA find some art. This art was placed in the ...\album_art folder. This art was wrong. SO:

2. You found acceptable art and, using PA, selected this art for the album. This put the new art into the ...\selected_aa folder.

3. You deleted the pamp file. Note - omit this step in the future!

I did this and Lo and Behold (and I would call this a bug) with art in BOTH folders for the same album AND no pamp file; the Player Art comes from the \selected_aa folder and the Thumb Art comes from the \album_art folder.

It SEEMS to be that when you do Step 2 PA replaces the pamp file with a new pamp file using the selected art. So in the future simply omit step 3 when you manually select art. As long as you don't delete the pamp file it will be correct.

For your current situation, simply redo step 2 is probably the simplest.

I actually do it a little different when PA finds incorrect art. I find the correct art and manually paste it over the incorrect art in the \album_art folder. This puts the correct art into the correct file name. I do need to delete the pamp file.

I never have any art in the \selected_aa folder when I finish. ALL my art is in the \album_art folder. This was an interesting little problem when you had art in BOTH folders.

Anyway, PLEASE post if this does OR doesn't help.

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