start from scratch (1 Viewer)

[Ben]

I have a lot (~9000albums) . After scan I found that going to Albums is very slow.
Also most pictures were plainly wrong, checked the directories and found lots of wrong pictures in folder.jpg files. Also many albums may have incorrect or no tags.
But I am using the same directory with the albums from another PC with WMP V11., and there most albums are OK.

I have been reading several posts here about how MP gets its pictures.
Is there somewhere an exact description?
I want to start a new directory with my MP3's that is specially for mediaportal as WMP continously updates info in the directory.
If I have a directory structure like:

Music
Artistname
Year - Albumname
01 - title.mp3
02 - title.mp3
.....
Year - Albumname
Artistname
etc.

Is there a way that it will only use the directory/filenames for filling the database?
And can I specify the convention I use for the Albumname, Year. Title and track number such that it will use that for filling the database?

I would like to start from scratch, how to I remove the current data from the database without a complete reinstall?

I removed the folder.jpg option in setup and rescanned, but still many problems.
I then found an option with MP itself to rebuild the music database. But when that one was finished there appeared to be nothing in my database. So I rescanned using mediaportal setup.

Is the rebuild in mp itself the way to 'clean' the database?

Going back from an 'inside' album view to albums view is very slow, probably due to the number of albums?


I also would like to suggest a possibility of not using folder.jpg as it is a windows
standard file and you never know what ms will do with it. My suggestion would be to allow for a MPAlbum.jpg (or MPAlbum.tbn) instead. Another option I would like to have is a MPArtist.jpg to be placed in the Artist directory. Which would make it possible to browse artists in a similar way as brwosing artists.

Thanks

Ben

 

[rtv]

I have a lot (~9000albums) . After scan I found that going to Albums is very slow.

Yes, you need to use "grouping" for that. Have a look at the artist view and its grouping and do the same for the album view.

Also most pictures were plainly wrong, checked the directories and found lots of wrong pictures in folder.jpg files. Also many albums may have incorrect or no tags.

MP relies on correct tags in many ways better get them sorted

Is there a way that it will only use the directory/filenames for filling the database?
And can I specify the convention I use for the Albumname, Year. Title and track number such that it will use that for filling the database?

There are lots of easy tools to add correct ID3-Tags based on your directory structure and / or filename to your files. It's worth the 2 hours of effort

I would like to start from scratch, how to I remove the current data from the database without a complete reinstall?

Just delete your music database would be enough. When starting the config after this a clean DB will be created. Finally scan again from the config.

In your special case you might need to enable the explorer option to view all files and check each album for wrong thumbs before + delete all contents of the thumbs\Music\* subdirectories.

Going back from an 'inside' album view to albums view is very slow, probably due to the number of albums?

After "grouping" this will be fast, too

Another option I would like to have is a MPArtist.jpg to be placed in the Artist directory. Which would make it possible to browse artists in a similar way as brwosing artists.

MP doesn't use the share's files after scanning to gain performance. Just put them into the thumbs\music\artist subdirectory. (The automatically fetched ones from last.fm/amazon also go there.

 

[Ben]

I started from scratch, deteled the database, and the files in thumbs (Albums and Artists). I then copied one artist to a new MP3 directory. This Artist has 15 albums . I created a new Folder.jpg with the right cover in each album directory.
Also placed a Folder.jpg in the Artist directory.

Went to setup, specified not to use MP3 tag coverart, 1dir per album and to use folder.jpg. What I expected was that after the scan these folder.jpg's are 'transfered 'with the album name to the thumbs\albums and the folder.jpg to the artist thumbs.

Hit scan

Checked the thumbs directory.

There are 18 pictures in the album directory, it looks like 2 per Album, making 9 albums. Where are the pictures of the other 6 Albums?

Checked the pictures of each album with its respective Folder.jpg. Wonder if it actually used the Folder.jpg at all, as the non-L version may wel be a compressed version of my original folder.jpg. The L (Large?) version looks like a inflated version of the smaller one, which is a pity as my original folder.jpg was smaller than the L but of far better quality than the small version.

One of my albums directories also had another jpg (not just the Folder.jpg) in there, and it looks like it used that one to 'copy' to the thumbs directory. Why?

But there are 2 pictures in there that are a mystery to me. One of my Album directories is called 'Indian Summer', it has a Folder.jpg with the right cover, so indeed in thumbs\albums I see this cover twice. But in thumbs I also see the same picture two more times with a different name namely 'Songs from the radio'.
I have no Album (directory) with that name, I not even have a song with that name. So where does it come from? And it means I have one album art less in my thumbs so I miss the art of 7 albums.

I also placed a Folder.jpg in the artist directory, it did not show up in the thumbs\artist, actually that directory is still empty. I guess it does need the id3 tags for everything?

Just trying to understand how it works, if I know that, I can update my directories to get the database filled correctly.

Thanks

Ben

 

[Ben]

more

So I started from scratch again

Then I edited each album as well.
Removed any coverart from the MP3's

Placed in every MP3 the Folder.jpg of that album in it as CoverArt.

Then in mp setup, I switched on every option:

Scan albums for various artists (all MP3's in all Albumbs have the same artist)
Treat tracks in an individual Folder as single Album (That is exactly what I have)
Use Coverart embedded in MP3's (I put in every MP3 in each album the Folder.jpg of that album as coverart).
Use Folder.jpg(Is ok too, though should now be the same as in the MP3's)
Create Artist and Genre tumbs from first file. (not exactly what I want, but OK, I thought then I will replace the artist jpg in the thumbs with the one I really want.)

So all these options are on....

And I hit the scan.

What I see in the thumbs albums is the coverart of 5 albums (I am missing 10)
The Artist and Genre thumbs are empty directories.

What am I missing?

Thanks

Ben

 

[tomtom21000]

Also many albums may have incorrect or no tags.

Ben

Did you check if your test mp3s are tagged correct?

Make sure for those that album and artist are tagged correct and try again
The "songs from radio" may come from an incorrect tag.

tomtom

 

[rtv]

yup, "songs from the radio" will be a wrong album tag.

One of my albums directories also had another jpg (not just the Folder.jpg) in there, and it looks like it used that one to 'copy' to the thumbs directory. Why?

For album cover generation only MP uses this order: png, jpg, gif, tbn as usually the .folder.png you may know from Linux isn't bound to the 64x64 standard and therefore should be better in quality terms.

I can hardly guess why some tracks aren't recognized on share scanning. Most likely the configuration.log will show additional info. This might be of use for hwahrmann if a tag should be correct but produces errors.

Nevertheless there's an option "Create folder thumb cache on demand" in general options - thumbnails. Activate this and whenever there's no folder.jpg thumb available MP will check in the background if it can find one.

 

[Ben]

>>yup, "songs from the radio" will be a wrong album tag.

found it. indeed 1 wrong tag

Went again through all the MP3's found the one with the wrong album. Also found that somehow tagscanner had not saved the coverart everytime.

So I scanned again from scratch Almost everything worked this time.
The thumbs are correct. An Artist thumb was created, the only thing there is that I see artists 4 files:
Al Stewart.jpg
Al StewartL.jpg
Al Stewart_.jpg
Al Stewart_L.jpg

So I checked my MP3's again, thought that there may have been an album or mp3 with the artist name and an additional underscore or a blank. Could not find it.
Replaced the Artist_L and Artist_ files with the picture I want for the Artist.
Works fine even in mediaportal I get the right picture. Tried to do the same thing with files without the underscore, delete the original 2, Copy the 2 with underscore and then rename them to name without underscore. The moment I renamed them the picture changes again to the wrong picture. Tried it several times but gave up. The picture is ok in mp....

There is only one small thing that is not correct.

When in MP I Go to Artists I see 2 characters:

A
V

A is correcrt as the only MP3 in the database are from Al Stewart.
So where does the V come from? If I click the V tab, there is nothing there only the 'go back' arrow. No albums. So even if there was still an MP3 with a wrong artist name there should as well be an album/mp3 , right?

Thanks

Ben

 

[rtv]

While MP is not running you can use the SQLite Database Browser.exe to view the music database.

The underscore is always added if illegal chars are detected in filenames. These might even be "invisible" in your current encoding. A common case are <LF> or null-byte-characters in the Artist tag.

The artist thumbs itself are only populated from last.fm lookups in Playing Now screen - I guess TomTom21000 can tell you about an intersting way to fetch those

If you check the "create artist / genre from 1st file" option only the embedded album art of the files will be used - which is pretty useless for what we want - but some user submitted a patch for that...