Need help reacquiring album art and removing duplicates

[H-Cue]

First off, I'd like to say I did try reading other posts and the wiki, but I'm such an amateur regarding music managers, tagging, etc, that I just get really confused with all the options in MusicBee and always end up doing the wrong thing, as you will see.



There's my current layout. As you can see my library is very poorly tagged and I've managed to get most (maybe all?) of my untagged albums (or artist) artwork to be set to the same picture! I mostly have one or two song from an artist and usually they're not from the same album. I don't really care about the "right" cover for each song or anything, I would just like to have all songs from the same artist under the artist's name and perhaps one album cover to contain all songs. Is that possible?

TL;DR

I would like to know how I can have MusicBee help me:
- Update all Artists artwork
- Update all Covers artwork
- Group all songs from one artist into one "generic" album

I tried fiddling with the settings but I still don't know what I'm doing. As you can see it seems all artists that didn't have an album artwork received the same cover. It seems MusicBee did a good job updating most artist artwork, but I'm having most issues with the album/covers. For example the band Cheiro de Amor has an artist picture in the left colum that is correct. However, in the top right "Playing Tracks" the wrong cover is shown. And in the bottom right yet a different cover is shown, so I really don't know what is happening.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you
Henry

[psychoadept]

Hi, welcome to the forum!

Regarding the album art, two questions:

How are your files organized? If they're all in one folder, then there's probably a folder.jpg that MusicBee has applied to them.

What are your settings in Tags(1) preferences? Maybe give us a screenshot of that. (If I'm right about about the first question, then you'll probably want to change your artwork source to embedded and rescan.)

[H-Cue]

Hello!

Thank you for the reply! You were right and there is a folder.jpg in my music folder and it's the Odetta picture that you can see. However, I had been fiddling with the settings and had set MusicBee to embed the artwork in the music file itself, so I don't understand what happened.



In any case, how would I go about rescanning and redownloading new artwork?

[H-Cue]

Any ideas? Is there a somewhat quick way to have musicbee look for album covers so my layout doesn't look repeated?

[psychoadept]

First, make sure you adjust your preferences for which pictures are displayed to show embedded first. Then look at tags (2) preferences and make sure the artwork providers are configured to your liking. I suggest fanart.tv, itunes, and last.fm, in that order.

Then, go back to your library and select all the files with the incorrect artwork. If it helps, you could put them in a playlist for bulk editing. Use the tag editor to remove the artwork from all at once.  Finally, still with all of them selected, right click and run auto-tag by track / update missing artwork.

It's not going to get them 100% right, but most should come up with a good match. Then you only have to fix the few that don't.

[H-Cue]

Ok, there is progress, but I still have not managed to get album art to be downloaded. As you can see on the left column, the artists'  artwork has been fixed, but not matter what I try, the album artwork is never found. I have tried right-clicking and selecting auto-tag by track > update missing artwork, but it doesn't do anything. I have also tweaked some setting in tags(1) and tags(2) as you can see from the screenshots. What am I missing here?

My goal is to just have one music file, with embedded artist picture, album cover and lyrics. The first and last are done (I believe), but album covers still deceives me. Thank you for the help once again.






Do I have to change the folder.jpg or something?

[frankz]

If you want embedded artwork, you shouldn't have folder.jpgs at all.  It's going down that list, so if there is no embedded artwork, it looks for artwork.* in the folder, then cover.*, then front.*, etc in the folder for every option you have selected in that box.  If it finds one of those, it will not show up in Update Missing Artwork, because it doesn't know there is missing artwork.  The artwork isn't "missing" because you have told it to use those files.

Try disabling EVERYTHING EXCEPT embedded then running Update Missing Artwork.