Album Cover vs. Artist Picture

[Joke9823]

Hello, I'm new with the MusicBee. How can I display large Album Cover automatically from the mp3-file's tag only in that case when there isn't any Artist Picture available in web? When there is Artist Picture available in web I want to display that. How should this be defined to MusicBee for Windows?

[tjinc]

Welcome to the forum Joke9823,

I don't think that you can do this but if you can post a screenshot of which area of MusicBee you are talking about, that might help.

You can use your own 'Artist picture' (which is then saved in your library folder). When you see an artist with no image. find an image you want to use, copy, right-click on the empty image in MB and 'Paste Artist Picture'.

[Joke9823]

Thank you tjinc. I saved the images of the artists that MusicBee couldn't find on the web into the folder defined in the Tags (1) section (by default C:\Users\username\Music\MusicBee\Artist Pictures). The name of the saved jpg-image must be the same as the artist name in the tag of the mp3-file in order for MusicBee to find the image. This is a good and working solution for me.

[tjinc]

Glad this works for you.

Note that you can save multiple pictures for the same artist here. Not certain of the file naming rules but I have always used:
<Artist>, <Artist>_1, <Artist>_2 etc.
and this works well - MusicBee will cycle through the images.

[Joke9823]

If I have a picture of an artist saved in the folder "Users\username\Music\MusicBee\Artist Pictures", I want MusicBee to show that picture throughout the entire song and not search the web for another picture. How could this be achieved? By the way, are the artist pictures more accurate if I turn off "bing" in the "retrieve web pictures - include: bing" section?

[tjinc]

I think that the options available to you are to 'Retrieve web pictures' or not.

 • 'Retrieve web pictures' enabled: MB will cycle between any locally stored images and any available from the web.
 • 'Retrieve web pictures' disabled: MB will cycle through any locally stored images and if none, will find one image from the web.
 • An additional option to 'Suspend Artwork Rotation' is available by a right-click on the artist picture itself - this will lock the display on the first locally stored image or the first image from the web (which is cached).

Bing images can be a bit more hit and miss, but is a massive resource. Only you can decide whether this works for you and your collection.