Music Indexing - Struggling with Album Art

[sprasad03]

Hey guys,

None of my music album art is showing even though, SongBird has applied album image to every song. It only shows the tiny thumbnail of the music art when the song is playing but when selecting or going through, everything is a gray image.

How can I get this working properly?

[darcilicious]

Yes, album art is buggy, especially for various artists. And as you have discovered, it will show up once you play a track for an album.

The best I can offer is to download and use a program called Mp3Tag -- safe and free to use -- and make sure that it sees the album art is there for each album.

Most recently, I completely deleted the media library on Boxee Box and was surprised that more album art showed up more often after re-scanning. I have no idea why that worked but it did...

That and wait for Boxee to get around to fixing the music section (several months down the road I'm afraid). There are a number of other music-related bugs as well (tracks for multi-CD albums are listed 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, etc) and a few others I don't recall at the moment.

Altneratively, you can use a program like AssetUPnP (install it on a computer) that does a much better job of displaying your music collection but you'll end up accessing via Files>>Browse>>Network>>UPnP>>AssetUPnP but from there it's quite nice. The program has a free/limited functionality version and costs something like $26 for the full license.

[joselitosway]

i feel your pain. it would be nice if there was an actual music section within the boxee GUI. hopefully boxee dev team will work on this. by the way... the visualizations are terrible within the music player... why should we hae to go to files > music??? thats wack. as well.. why can we only sort through albums, and artists?? what about a playlist feature, and a songs feature??

[mph]

I opened a JIRA ticket for this:
http://jira.boxee.tv/browse/BOXEE-7988

The issue I observed is that it loads the cover art from the files when you first add a media source. Once you reboot, it seems to first check the discogs website for the image (where it's usually lower quality or scraped incorrectly), and if it doesn't find anything, loads your coverart when you play the song. Vote for this issue if you find it annoying.

[sprasad03]

Another weird thing, tell me if anyone else has this problem. My external HDD hooked up to the boxee, I went into the files for each album right, now there is like 4 different jpgs showing in each album that were never there before. Is that boxee downloading multilpe jpgs?

[BarnyBoo]

I opened a JIRA ticket for this:
http://jira.boxee.tv/browse/BOXEE-7988

The issue I observed is that it loads the cover art from the files when you first add a media source. Once you reboot, it seems to first check the discogs website for the image (where it's usually lower quality or scraped incorrectly), and if it doesn't find anything, loads your coverart when you play the song. Vote for this issue if you find it annoying.

Hi mph,

I'd like to add that I'm using build 1.0.3.17064 and experiencing exactly the same symptoms. Upon powering up my BB it seems to ignore all embedded artwork and displays images from Discogs instead. If I go to and select 'Settings/System/Advanced/Clear media information from the library' then it begins to rescan the music files. After this, all embedded artwork is restored until the next time it is rebooted.

I've added my vote to your JIRA ticket BOXEE-7988 and also to another by darcilicious BOXEE-5046 that I reckon may be connected

[KevinSartori]

Your issue is related to the bug report I filed as well, which they've recently reopened after they thought they had it solved:

http://jira.boxee.tv/browse/BOXEE-7520

"My music collection on my PC is set up with individual folders for each album. MP3 files are meticulously tagged and each folder contains a folder.jpg that is a scan of the cover. After Boxee has scanned my music collection, it displays all of my albums using the folder.jpg. However, following a reboot, it only retains some of the thumbnails and replaces many of them with lower quality (or incorrect) thumbnails that I assume are from discogs.com.

Boxee Box should use the local folder.jpg if it exists before grabbing a cover online. "

[stevo81989]

Unfortunately unless it is a critical music ticket, it will have to be put on hold. The limited amount of developers Boxee has means they have to focus on what (they feel) is most important. And they believe video is more important than audio (and i would wager a majority of owners would say the same thing).

Avner said in that web interview I think that music and the visualizations will be reevaluated and changed once they feel they have the bugs and content partners sorted out. So it seems like it will be while

[BarnyBoo]

Cheers guys,

I fully understand and probably agree that video is the priority but it's a real shame about this niggling fault. I think the Boxee Box is a great wee unit and sold itself to me because of it's all round abilities. If I wasn't so anal it probably wouldn't matter but I must admit I cringe every time I see all those scraped images messing up my perfectly catalogued music collection. I shall look forward to future updates with bated breath.

[stevo81989]

I absolutely agree. i also have most of my music art embedded in the song itself. Would be nice if it could pull it from that too. Oh well, all in time.