Problem with music cover art

[rmongiovi 0]

When I set up my music library I named all my cover art as the folder name dot jpg.  They all display fine on the emby dashboard and on the emby roku app.

I just got a WiiM ultra which can display cover are, but it doesn't understand that naming format.  It wants the cover art to be named literally "album.jpg" or "cover.jpg".  There are also a number of other alternatives.  When I do that, the WiiM ultra sees the cover are but the emby app starts displaying the cover art as a collage of four copies of the cover.

Does anyone know why emby is doing this or how to work around it?  Thanks.

[visproduction 352]

WiiM has it's own requirements for names that has nothing to do with Emby.  You could batch copy all the images to WiiM album.jpg. Command line xcopy and other file renaming software can do all your files by clicking enter once.  When you find out how to do that, it's a pretty easy fix.

Related: https://forum.wiimhome.com/threads/albumcover-but-what-name.8227/

[rmongiovi 0]

Yes, wiim likes cover.jpg or folder.jpg.  The question is, why does emby display a single cover.jpg file as a collage of 4 copies?  That doesn't seem right.

[Luke 42420]

3 hours ago, rmongiovi said:

Yes, wiim likes cover.jpg or folder.jpg.  The question is, why does emby display a single cover.jpg file as a collage of 4 copies?  That doesn't seem right.

HI there, can you please provide a specific example?

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Thanks !

 

[rmongiovi 0]

I have no idea how to answer that question.  My folder structure is, for example, "E:\Music\Rock\The Beatles\Abbey Road", which contains all the tracks from the album plus the m3u8 file which populated the album playlist.  It also contained the cover art file "The Beatles - Abbey Road.jpg".

I have a bunch of playlists that emby created from the m3u8 files and also a bunch of collections that I added those playlists to so that I could classify my albums as "Classical", "Jazz", or "Rock".

To be compatible with WiiM I renamed all my jpg files to "cover.jpg".  Now if I select my Music library with the web interface Metadata Manager and view the folder tab it shows each cover art as a single image.  But if I select Playlists or Collections on the left hand side of the Metadata Manager all my playlists are collages of four copies of the album art rather than the single full size image that I see directly in the Music library.

Before I renamed all my cover art files the top level Collection names - Classical, Jazz, and Rock - were collages of the first four playlists in the collection but all the entries in the Collections and in the Playlists were single cover art images.  Now all the entries in the Collections and Playlists are collages and because they represent a single album it's just four copies of the same image.  Since the Playlist entry is a single album with a single cover art file it really should be just an image, not a collage.

[rmongiovi 0]

I did some experimenting and have discovered that if the cover art file name is the same as the m3u file name then emby sees the cover art and gives you a single image.

If the cover art file name is something like "album" or "cover" but different from the m3u file name then emby sees the cover art but generates a collage image.

If the cover art file name something random and different from the m3u file name then emby doesn't see it at all.

So the secret to being compatible with WiiM seems to be to name the cover art and m3u file both something like "album".

[rmongiovi 0]

And unfortunately renaming all those files causes emby to forget some of the playlist names as well as remove all the playlists from collections so you have to recreate them.

[Luke 42420]

Hi @rmongiovi the album and playlist are two separate things. There’s currently no way to name the image so that it will be used by both, although that’s not a bad idea to think about supporting. 
 

besides renaming, another option is to have two copies of the image file.

[rmongiovi 0]

Oh, it's not too difficult to deal with.  The big gap seems to be that there doesn't appear to be any accurate documentation about how this all works.

The workflow I've developed is to put the folder containing an album in my music library with both the cover art and m3u file names album.jpg and album.m3u respectively.  The two files having the same base filename seems to be what Emby requires to recognize them and picking that filename as "album" allows the Wiim to recognize the cover art file.  Apparently when Emby creates the playlist from the m3u file it makes the playlist name the m3u filename so then I go into the metadata manager and rename the playlist from "album" to what I want the playlist to be called.  Then I add that playlist to the appropriate collection and I'm good to go.

It's not exactly elegant but it seems to work and accomplish my objectives.  As I said, the major issue is that I had to figure this out myself by trial and error.  I suppose keeping a separate cover art file named album.jpg would be a simpler solution but I prefer not to clutter up my folders with extra files (or symlinks).

[visproduction 352]

Mon, 

I think you are on the right path with this approach.  I've noticed with Emby, if there is no assigned image or perhaps if the file name doesn't match exactly to work as a cover, then Emby will make the 4 images in one combination.  The idea is that this often pulls images from a library or collection, so you get 4 different images.  Once you have a correctly titled image or you insert your own custom image, then, I think Emby sees the image is there and it won't make the 4 image montage.  Think over your process, maybe that's why all the 4 in one images got created.  Hope that helps.

[Luke 42420]

22 hours ago, rmongiovi said:

Oh, it's not too difficult to deal with.  The big gap seems to be that there doesn't appear to be any accurate documentation about how this all works.

The workflow I've developed is to put the folder containing an album in my music library with both the cover art and m3u file names album.jpg and album.m3u respectively.  The two files having the same base filename seems to be what Emby requires to recognize them and picking that filename as "album" allows the Wiim to recognize the cover art file.  Apparently when Emby creates the playlist from the m3u file it makes the playlist name the m3u filename so then I go into the metadata manager and rename the playlist from "album" to what I want the playlist to be called.  Then I add that playlist to the appropriate collection and I'm good to go.

It's not exactly elegant but it seems to work and accomplish my objectives.  As I said, the major issue is that I had to figure this out myself by trial and error.  I suppose keeping a separate cover art file named album.jpg would be a simpler solution but I prefer not to clutter up my folders with extra files (or symlinks).

Regarding documentation, did you take a look at Music Naming ?

[rmongiovi 0]

Yes.  Yes I did.  Does it describe the relationship between m3u and jpg filename that I described above?  Does it describe the relationship between m3u filename and playlist name that I described above?  Does it explain the relationship between playlist name and collection entry that I describe above?  Perhaps my reading comprehension is insufficient but I don't see it.

[rmongiovi 0]

Oh, and not to mention that "Music Naming" doesn't mention that any name will work as long as the cover art and m3u file names are the same.  When I rip a CD with EAC it names the m3u file and the cover art with the artist and album name.  That works just fine (except that the Wiim doesn't support cover are named that way).  I ended up using "album" since it worked and seemed mnemonic to me and Wiim says they support it.  But it's not mentioned on the Music Naming list.  So it's not at all clear to me what that page means by "Several image types support multiple file names."  What Emby actually supports seems to be considerably more flexible that what that page describes.

Edited May 3 by rmongiovi