Why am I often not getting artist pictures on the "Now playing" tab?

[Sigma]

When I switch to the "Now playing" tab, it searches online for an artist picture and then displays it as a background. For some reason though, I'm not getting pictures appearing for lots of popular artists. Examples include Madonna, The Beatles, Rihanna, Alice in Chains. All I get is a coloured background instead.

What's going on? Where does MusicBee pull these pictures in from? Where are the settings related to this? Is it some kind of image copyright issue?

Thanks!

[Tybot]

Which "mode" are you using for display? Any of the default ones or did you download/make it yourself?

Red box:
https://i.imgur.com/A7KOlyD.jpg

Not sure where it fetches the images from but I'm fairly certain you can't choose which site it fetches from. You can however display local pictures alongside the ones from the web. I don't have any issues with e.g Madonna. I have no local pictures of her which means they're all from the web.

[Sigma]

Thanks for the reply. I think I might have found the cause of this.

If you go into Preferences - Tags (2), what are your artwork providers and what order are they in?

Here's what I have now: -



This is working. When I made this thread, I had Google at the top and fanart.com second. I swapped the order of those two around and now it works. I don't understand why though, but it does.

As for the display mode, these are my settings: -



Under Theater Mode I don't even see "artist picture" as an option. I have "Cine View", "Default Narrow and Wide" and "Rdio Style (embedded).

However, the setting I was using before - having "Artist picture" selected as in my screenshot above, was working fine until recently.

I wonder if there's some issue with receiving artist pictures from Google, however, I assumed that by having multiple items checked on the list, it would go through each of them in turn, but that doesn't seem to be the case, because with Google at the top, I get no pictures for Madonna and Rihanna, for example, but with fanart.com at the top, I do.

[Sigma]

So, changing the order has not fixed this. It's just changed the artists I don't get pictures for. For example, now I do get pics for Madonna and Rihanna, but I don't get them for Stevie Wonder, Wu-Tang Clan and The Notorious B.I.G.

[Tybot]

The setting in "Tags (2)", to my knowledge, only applies to Artwork like front covers etc and has nothing to do with the artist pictures in "Now Playing". I tried unchecking all the providers and I still get artist pictures in "Now Playing".

If your current settings were working fine up until recently, I'd stand by a few days and then verify if the issue is still there or not. It could just be a temporary connection hick-up with the server from where the images are fetched.

OT: If you right-click any file and select "Edit", then under the tab "Tags" you right-click on the album cover and select "Search Internet", you'll see what I mean in my first paragraph. Here you find you artwork provides, like fanart, google, itunes store and so on. That's what the setting in Preferences->Tags(2) controls.

[Sigma]

Yeah, you're right. If I uncheck all of the providers it still pulls in artist pictures sometimes.

I wonder what's going on here then. Where does it connect to to get these pics? Are there no settings related to this?

[frankz]

It's pretty easy to run a DNS sniffing tool on your computer to see where these requests are going (pretty sure it's Bing (and Google) for the large ones and last.fm for the small ones) if knowing the source matters that much to you, but if you're having trouble getting images for major artists like Stevie Wonder and Madonna it doesn't matter where the requests are going because something else is wrong.  

Any site that Steven would code into MB for this type of search no matter how small would be able to provide images for big name artists like that.  He knows what he's doing to say the least.  He wouldn't institute an artist image search that wouldn't retrieve images of Madonna.

[Pinky]

Ah! This is happening to me as well. It's worth saying I'm a new user of about a month and still trying to find my way around. This thread is being particularly useful and I've followed and implemented the suggestions so far to no avail, I still get a coloured background for some famous artists.  If I do a search for one of these artists in Google Images it list 100's or more photos. I wonder why MB doesn't find them?  If this is always going to be the case, is there a way for me to grab a selection of the artists photos and somehow get MB to display them (sequentially) when playing the track?

[frankz]

Ah! This is happening to me as well. It's worth saying I'm a new user of about a month and still trying to find my way around. This thread is being particularly useful and I've followed and implemented the suggestions so far to no avail, I still get a coloured background for some famous artists.  If I do a search for one of these artists in Google Images it list 100's or more photos. I wonder why MB doesn't find them?  If this is always going to be the case, is there a way for me to grab a selection of the artists photos and somehow get MB to display them (sequentially) when playing the track?

Be sure MB finds them.  Most are likely rejected.  Artist pictures need to be high-res or they would look bad as backdrops.  

If you look in your %AppData%/Local/MusicBee/Internal Cache/ArtistBackdrops, the .dat files are the retrieved artist photos.  They are quite large dimension-wise.  If you change .dat to .jpg, you can view them as you would any image to check (I'd change it back after).

You can emulate the kind of search MB seems to be doing (I don't know for sure, total guess based on what's coming back) by limiting your google image search to "Larger than 4MP" under the google image search tools menu.  

There are instructions around here for placing custom images in the right place for MB to find them.  In the most recent version, you can also copy/paste it directly.

[Sigma]

Ah! This is happening to me as well. It's worth saying I'm a new user of about a month and still trying to find my way around. This thread is being particularly useful and I've followed and implemented the suggestions so far to no avail, I still get a coloured background for some famous artists.  If I do a search for one of these artists in Google Images it list 100's or more photos. I wonder why MB doesn't find them?  If this is always going to be the case, is there a way for me to grab a selection of the artists photos and somehow get MB to display them (sequentially) when playing the track?

I've been using MusicBee for years and this issue only started happening in this past week. Previously, the only time I had to manually add an artist picture is if the artist was obscure - I certainly never had to manually add pics for artists like Stevie Wonder and Madonna and there is absolutely no way that MusicBee is rejecting pics of artists like that because it can't find one that's good enough quality.

It seems like the search is intermittently timing out for some reason. For example, if I play a song by a popular artist and go to the Now Playing tab and after a few seconds it finds a pic, if I then go and delete the dat file for that artist and repeat the process, sometimes it times out and just gives me a coloured background, but other times it will find the same picture it found previously. Clearly, this shouldn't be happening as you should be getting the same result each time.

[frankz]

OK seems  like you've got it figured out then.  Good luck!

[Steven]

MB uses last.fm and fanart.tv for artist backdrops.
I was using this myself yesterday and all was working fine.
Send me a screenshot of the artist splitter dialog for one you think is not working

[Sigma]

MB uses last.fm and fanart.tv for artist backdrops.
I was using this myself yesterday and all was working fine.
Send me a screenshot of the artist splitter dialog for one you think is not working

Thanks for the reply, Steven.

Here's an example: -



In fact, as yet, all of the affected artists are just single name artists, as in that example. There's no "X ft. Y" stuff going on that might screw up the search.

[Steven]

Tried Stevie Wonder now and get 21 picture matches.

[Tybot]

Your tags look correct and seeing as we're talking about fairly popular artist which seems to be fetched for other MB users, it feels more like a connectivity issue to me. I'd stand by my initial suggestion of making sure this issue persists over a period of time to rule out a temporary glitch.

Out of curiosity, what type of internet connection do you use? Are you running any P2P-software or streaming services? Do you have any active AVs and/or software firewalls?