@hiccup
My point wasn't to convince you, you can counter all my arguments, so am I. eg.: even if I know that you don't want the 4:3 for displaying perfectly this old aspect ratio, I could just use your sentence like this:
"I don't think you can call
4:3 a compromise. It's a clear decision for displaying that
(old) aspect ratio perfectly, and cropping all different and more
recent ones."
And so on. Endless and useless debate. I don't even have a good english to initiate a debate.
And I don't even care about this since, as shown in my screenshot, you can resize this frame. Being able to resize manually this frame without having to stack it with another element is another story
Just wanted to say that, imo, for newcomers, the 16:9 seems to be the best default setting since MusicBee seems to mostly retrieve backdrops from fanart.tv. But I may be wrong.
@sleepless
There's no problem! The only problem is my poor english: always writing an annoying wall of text when I could just use a short sentence in my natural language or sound harsh when it's not intended.
MB is a higly configurable music manager. So people use it in so many different ways.
For example, to achieve what I can see on your sreenshots, I'm doing it in a completely different way: I just put a 1:1 artist picture in the album folder then configure MusicBee to rotate between the Album Artworks and my squared artist picture. This way, I can keep the Artist Pictures element for something else.
Artist Pictures Element, Compact Player, TM, Now Playing tab share the same artist pictures source: web or local "Artist Pictures" folder. So, those using TM with artist pictures as a fullscreen "wallpaper" would expect to have a 16:9 artist picture element since they mostly have 16:9 pictures.
In fact, here the deal:
4:3 -> biggest portrait / 16:9 cropped
16:9 -> smalest portrait / 16:9 not cropped
@Bee-liever
Damn, trying to argue for your 16:9 request and hiccup gonna hate me for this. And now you want a portrait artist picture element ?
Just kidding.
@Bee-liever @HHM
Here the trick. Just stack the artist picture with a random element (for example, I'm using the Artist Bio element). Works in all lateral panel (sidebar or lateral main panel).
Display the random element (Artist Bio), resize it then switch to the artist picture. If no picture is displayed, just restart MusicBee. Depending on your layout, you may also have to sacrifice a 3rd element (Track information in my screenshot).
Since it's not officially supported, just hope that Steven is not going to fix this, now