Bugzilla – Bug 6723
Wrong artwork is displayed for "No Album" in album context
Last modified: 2011-02-26 16:03:24 UTC
I have many songs without an album tag (thus will appear under "No Album"). For example, individual songs ripped from CD Singles. These songs can have different artwork (either a folder.jpg in folders that hold the no album songs, or embedded artwork in the songs), or sometimes no artwork at all. I believe that when displaying artwork for an album, SqueezeCenter shows the artwork associated with the first song on that album. Normally that is correct, as all songs on an album should have the same album artwork. However, "No Album" is special, in that it appears both within "Browse Albums > No Album", but can also appear in filtered form under each artist. Also, each song could well have different artwork. The "No Album" artwork that appears is therefore fairly random, and may change when performing rescans of the library. For example: If I "Browse Albums", the artwork that is displayed in the list for "No Album" is for the first song in the whole library that has "No album". If I browse to an Artist that has "No Album", it still shows the artwork for the first song in the whole library that has "No album", instead of the artwork for the first song by that artist that has "No album". So when I go to "Browse Albums > Tori Amos", I see a "No Album" entry with the artwork for some song by a rap artist! If I browse to a song, it always displays the correct artwork associated with the song. I think it would probably be more correct when browsing to an artist's "No Album" to display the artwork for the first song within the "No Album". This however is still not very intelligent, as the artist could have many songs with different song artwork. Therefore maybe it would be best to always display the "No artwork" image for "No album" when in an album list context. For gold-plating, it may be nice to have a special "No Album" artwork image instead of using the same "No artwork" image. Nb. When displaying artwork for an individual song, the song's artwork should still be displayed.
Seems reasonable to display the generic icon for any album that's "No Album". One thing, though, I'm curious as to what artwork is associated with songs that don't have an album?
Dean, I have several cases for adding songs to my music library that do not have an album tag. Mainly: 1. Songs ripped from CD Singles. I don't want the CD single name as the album name, as it clutters "Browse Albums" with many items that only have a few tracks (frequently only one track ripped from the single). I also often don't rip all songs from the CD Singles, only those that I haven't already ripped from my CD Albums. All extra tracks for that artist then appear under "No Album" for that artist. I often embed the artwork for the CD Single into those songs. 2. Podcasts that I download using an external program and get scanned into the library. Some podcasts don't have an album tag. All podcast sites have their own enclosures folder. I download an image from the podcast producer and put this in the enclosures folder (as folder.jpg).
FYI, there's already a jive-specific fix for this. Grep Slim::Control::Queries for $noAlbumName and you'll see how it's implemented there.
I think the schema should be changed to support per-song artwork, and per-album artwork. I would create a table to hold all artwork, and hold foreign keys within "albums" and "tracks" tables. Then in album context, it can display the album artwork, but in song context (eg. displaying a playlist of songs), it can show song artwork.
I want to go even farther, allowing multiple artwork items per album or I guess even song. For people who have scans of the back cover, liner notes, etc. But I think this is future work at this point.
(In reply to comment #4) I think the DB does already support per-album artwork (at least in 7.4 nightlies it does, which is what I'm using). I suppose this could be done with some 3rd party plugin (not sure which one), but I'd like to see the option to have a browse by albums option where only albums with more than X tracks are included - much like the 3rd party program 'muso' (http://klarita.net/muso.html) - this would filter out singles and/or EPs.
Moving 7.4 bugs to 8.0.
I just got hit with this bug using Squeeze Commander on Android. When a song from No Album is playing, the No Album artwork is shown which is (a noted above) pretty unrelated. Debugging this, I found SC is doing a POST to /jsonrpc.js like this: {"id":1,"method":"slim.request","params":["00:04:20:22:53:42",["status","0","15","tags:asdlueyorjJxNK"]]} The json reply has "artwork_track_id" set to the No Album artwork. Note that this is not in an album context at all. This happens whenever a No Album track is playing. By itself, as part of a custom playlist, as part of a random track mix. It seems that Squeezebox Server 7.5 does support track based artwork, because the track id (that is also part of the json reply) can be used in artwork URLs as well: http://squeezeboxserver:9001/music/15891/cover_150x150_o On the iPhone the iPeng client uses this "id" field instead of "artwork_track_id" to fetch artwork. IMHO the "artwork_track_id" being set to a fairly random and unrelated No Album artwork is still a bug.
I just found that my Squeezebox Touch also shows the "artwork_track_id" image. It is pretty strange to see the Touch show the wrong artwork while iPeng shows the correct one. Please fix this.