Author Topic: Functionality for higher quality artist thumbnails in artwork view  (Read 15259 times)

ma_t14

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It seems that by default all artist thumbnails in artwork view are of low quality when first populated. This doesn't look very good on bigger monitors where you might want the thumbnails to appear bigger.

I'm not sure why the thumbs are of so low quality but if I had to guess it might have something to do with performance while scrolling or time needed to populate.

If scrolling performance is not affected by the quality of the thumbs after they are populated I suggest to provide an option to automatically download high quality thumbs instead of low quality ones.

Fanart.tv (which is already supported for album covers) is the perfect website for this task in my opinion since it has artist thumbnails for the majority artists and most of the times the most downloaded thumb is also the best looking.

I think of this feature as an automated single function process. Just download the most downloaded artist thumb from fanart.tv for each and every single artist.

I know you can change the artist thumbs manually but it would take forever for a large library and hence having this kinda of functionality would make things so much easier. Please correct me if there is indeed an easy way to accomplish this.

Steven what do you think? Would something like this be easy to implement?

I imagine that there are more people with big monitors, like me, who wish to have higher quality artwork instead of the current low-quality ones. So voice your opinion people!  :)

Iasc

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+100 for me.

this has been asked for before and i think the reason the thumbs are low quality is because music bee only uses last.fm. it would be great if music bee searched fanart.tv before searching last.fm

psychoadept

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Yeah, it was discussed in greater length here: http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=7441

+1 from me (again)
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Steven

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i will have a look at this but one problem with fanart.tv is they use a musicbrainz id in the query, so that means musicbee needs to a search of music brainz first and then query fanart.tv. As well as making it slower it also makes it less reliable. Then the actual image is very large to download.
But i realise this is a popular wishlist request

psychoadept

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Yeah, I've seen how that occasionally causes trouble with album art.  Is there any way for MusicBee to use the Musicbrainz artist ID from tags, if it's in our files?  Most of mine have Musicbrainz artist IDs, release IDs, etc.
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Steven

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this is done for the next update.
it now retrieves artist thumb pictures from theaudiodb.com and fanart.tv
for fanart.tv, if your file has a musicbrainz artist id it will use that id to lookup the artist
additionally you can put your own thumb pictures in the Thumb sub-folder of your artist pictures folder

i will make the link available later today

vivadavid

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Hello, Steven,

Looking forward to the update. However, I thought we could already add our own artist thumbnails: I've just done that for the first time. Do you mean that the process will be more straight-forward from now on?

Thanks,

David

Steven

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it would paste to the new ThumbNail folder rather than embeding in the music file and wouldnt show the Save Picture dialog

vivadavid

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What I did before was basically to get a JPEG file, rename it with the name of an artist and place it in the ArtistThumb folder (in the appropriate subfolder acccording to the first letter of the artist name).

You've just mentioned things I'm not familiar with. I don't quite get when you say that, so far, the artist thumbmail is embedded in the MP3 file. I thought the artist thumbnail was just in the ArtistThumb folder, but not embedding anywhere...

Steven

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seems you know too much about the system for your own good!
thats the artist picture cache and its a bad idea to be pasting artwork directly in there. Up until now the artist pictures cache only gets reset if you explity do that from one of the menu commands. Going forward it will get reset automatically in certain circumstances and you would lose the picture. I suggest you take a copy of the pictures you want to keep.

Now when you right click on a artist picture the "Paste Artwork" menu item will do what i described above. Previously that menu item was only visible if you had a picture copied in the windows clipboard

vivadavid

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I wasn't dealing with the folder ArtistCache, but with ArtistThumb.

In any case, the new behaviour seems like it'll do what I did before: to copy a JPEG file in the subfolder with the first letter of the artist name. It'll be easier, though, to do it through MB, and I'll make sure I keep a backup copy.

I'll wait for the update to see how it works.

Thanks!

Steven

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ArtistThumb is the internal MB cache for the artist thumb pictures displayed in the artwork layout.
everything i said above stands

ma_t14

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seems you know too much about the system for your own good!
thats the artist picture cache and its a bad idea to be pasting artwork directly in there. Up until now the artist pictures cache only gets reset if you explity do that from one of the menu commands. Going forward it will get reset automatically in certain circumstances and you would lose the picture. I suggest you take a copy of the pictures you want to keep.

Now when you right click on a artist picture the "Paste Artwork" menu item will do what i described above. Previously that menu item was only visible if you had a picture copied in the windows clipboard

Oops, that's what I was doing as well for artists that were missing pictures. I had no idea that the "paste artwork" menu was there.

Anyway, a huge thank you for implementing this!  :)