Album art in Media Player randomly does not show

answered 2014-03-21 23:28:15 +0200

keithzg
788 ●15 ●18 ●19

It's also possible to manually add album art, and this doesn't require wiping tracker's index.

Tracker follows the Media Art Storage Spec, which specifies that album art is stored as:

album-md5sum1-md5sum2.jpeg

where the first md5sum is the lowercase, sanitized artist name, and the second is the same for the album title. So for example, the filename for the cover art for the album "Future, And It Doesn't Work + Remixes" by Starscream can be derived with:

coverartfilename=album-$(echo -n "starscream" | md5sum | cut -d ' ' -f 1)-$(echo -n "future, and it doesnt work remixes" | md5sum | cut -d ' ' -f 1).jpeg

which spits out album-3a929676851388eb2360738a17fe053e-0197d66016bfa6620a37f361474d9d44.jpeg

Similarly, the band White Lung whose music on Bandcamp is tagged as "WHITE LUNG" would be derived by md5summing "white lung".

Tracker stores the album art in /home/nemo/.cache/media-art/, either as actual copies or as symbolic links if the album is located on the sdcard (in which case the actual files are in /path/to/album/folder/.mediaartlocal/). So by copying a piece of album art into the /home/nemo/.cache/media-art/ folder with the appropriate filename, you can manually add cover art. It has worked so far for me!

My coding skills are pretty poor, but this does seem like a good case for a simple app (or at least script) that can be pointed at a track and generate from its metadata the right filename and plunk a respective .jpeg in the cache folder, and I might take a stab at that---might be nice sometimes to manually set cover art anyways.

I also haven't checked yet if the Media app supports per-track art (the example that came to my mind, and appears to be cited in the Media Art Storage Spec, is NIN's Ghosts I-IV, where every track has unique art).

answered 2015-09-15 23:02:55 +0200

coolman
1 ●1

updated 2015-09-15 23:03:52 +0200

This (more workaround than) solution should work on Mac / iTunes combination with Jolla m4a files based on this source. It requires the mp4v2 (tools) to be installed – install with MacPorts or any other install method you prefer.

This shell script extracts all the album cover available inside the mp4 music files and puts them into the folder media-art which could finally be transferred to the jolla phone.

recurse() gets all m4a files inside the iTunes directory of current user. create() extracts the cover art (if one exists) and saves it with the required filename of album-artist’s md5-album’s md5.

Before the md5 sums were made, the artist and the album names are “simplified”: To lower case, deleting parenthesis including there inner content, eliminating longer than single spaces, removing some unwanted character and final the translation of utf-8 to non-combined, compatibility form (NFKD).

Please have a look to the previous discussions to get the right understanding about the missed functionality of the Jolla and the requirements of a possible fix.

#!/bin/bash

normalize() {
 norm=$(echo -n "$1" | sed -e s/'([^)]*)'/''/g | sed -e s/'\s{2,}'/' '/g | tr -d '\046''\047''\057' | iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8-mac)
 echo -n $norm
}

create() {
 artist=$(normalize "$(mp4info "$1" | egrep "^ Artist:" | cut -c10- | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')")
 album=$(normalize "$(mp4info "$1" | egrep "^ Album:" | cut -c9- | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')")
 coverartfilename=album-$(echo -n $artist | md5)-$(echo -n $album | md5).jpeg
 echo $artist: $album
 echo $coverartfilename
 cp "$1" media-art/music.mp4
 mp4art --extract media-art/music.mp4
 if [ -f media-art/music.art[0].jpg ]; then
  mv media-art/music.art[0].jpg media-art/$coverartfilename
 fi
}

recurse() {
 for i in "$1"/*;do
  if [ -d "$i" ];then
    recurse "$i"
   elif [ -f "$i" ]; then
    if [[ $i == *.m4a ]]; then
     create "$i"
    fi
   fi
 done
}

itunes=~/Music/iTunes
if test -d media-art; then
 rm media-art/*.jpeg
else
 mkdir media-art
fi
recurse $itunes
rm media-art/music.mp4