Author Topic: Support for "disable auto-downloading artist thumb" option  (Read 1888 times)

redwing

  • Guest
After Spotify was added as a fallback for artist thumb, MB often saves an album cover as artist thumb for some artists. For instance, out of 150 newly downloaded artist thumbs of my initial test, 88 was album covers.
The problem is it ends up displaying a cover that the user may not own in the collection and preventing MB from re-trying retrieving a thumb for the artist because the artist already got a (wrong) thumb.
Currently there's no way to stop MB from doing this unless you give up displaying artist thumb altogether by using "show album cover" option for thumbnail browser.
If there was an option to disable auto-downloading artist thumb, then users could address the issue by only enabling it when updating artist thumb and then removing downloaded covers from the local thumb folder.

Bizy

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 304
+1
Full installer Version 3_4_7805
Portable Editon 3_4_7805 P
OS: Windows 10 Home Edition

redwing

  • Guest
I've come up with a little trick as follows to command MB's artist thumb retrieval behavior.

If MB cannot find a thumb for an artist to retrieve, it creates a zero-byte PNG file in the thumb cache folder and stop attempting to search for that artist afterwards. Then all you need to do is to add a zero-byte PNG file in the cache folder for artists it had downloaded an album cover or any other unwanted picture in order to keep MB from attempting to re-download them after you removed those pictures.

So when auto-downloading of artist thumb is done, exit MB.
Go to your local thumb folder, sort pictures by date, find those unwanted pictures and move them to another folder.
Go to the new folder with full of unwanted jpg files and create a batch file with a text editor as follows:

Code
@echo off
:: Changes all jpg files in the folder to zero-byte files
for %%a in (*.jpg) do type nul>"%%a"
:: Changes file extension from jpg to pNg
ren *.jpg *.pNg
:: Moves the zero-byte files to the thumb cache folder (modify the target path to your own)
move *.pNg C:\MB\AppData\InternalCache\ArtistThumbs
As commented within the code, what it does is to change all jpg files to zero-byte png files and move them to your thumb cache folder, overwriting existing files.
It uses pNg rather than png as extension so that you can easily tell the file was created by you, not by MB.
Now if you re-start MB, it won't send a single request for a thumb for those artists as long as you keep that zero-byte file in the cache folder.
Also you can freely paste your own picture to those artists manually whenever you find a good thumb. Then the zero-byte file gets replaced by the local picture, so nothing to worry about.

IIKLYDEII

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 4
I've come up with a little trick as follows to command MB's artist thumb retrieval behavior.

If MB cannot find a thumb for an artist to retrieve, it creates a zero-byte PNG file in the thumb cache folder and stop attempting to search for that artist afterwards. Then all you need to do is to add a zero-byte PNG file in the cache folder for artists it had downloaded an album cover or any other unwanted picture in order to keep MB from attempting to re-download them after you removed those pictures.

So when auto-downloading of artist thumb is done, exit MB.
Go to your local thumb folder, sort pictures by date, find those unwanted pictures and move them to another folder.
Go to the new folder with full of unwanted jpg files and create a batch file with a text editor as follows:

Code
@echo off
:: Changes all jpg files in the folder to zero-byte files
for %%a in (*.jpg) do type nul>"%%a"
:: Changes file extension from jpg to pNg
ren *.jpg *.pNg
:: Moves the zero-byte files to the thumb cache folder (modify the target path to your own)
move *.pNg C:\MB\AppData\InternalCache\ArtistThumbs
As commented within the code, what it does is to change all jpg files to zero-byte png files and move them to your thumb cache folder, overwriting existing files.
It uses pNg rather than png as extension so that you can easily tell the file was created by you, not by MB.
Now if you re-start MB, it won't send a single request for a thumb for those artists as long as you keep that zero-byte file in the cache folder.
Also you can freely paste your own picture to those artists manually whenever you find a good thumb. Then the zero-byte file gets replaced by the local picture, so nothing to worry about.

Interesting. Lets see if this fixes my issue.