Auto-Tag Artwork With Local Files

[JBeebs528491]

Hey, Everyone,

Just wanted to see, is there a way to make MusicBee automatically add, remove or otherwise update artwork that is already downloaded?

When I add music to my library, I always look for the highest quality versions of the album and single artworks I can find, then download them to the folder with the MP3s. I attribute all the album covers as 'Album Cover' and the single artworks as 'Album Cover (back),' then I base their filenames on what they are. Here is an example:



For all the images, I count how many versions I can find of a particular cover and count it at the end of the filename, preceded by an underscore. With the singles, I precede the underscore with the disc and track number associated with the song file. For both album and single artworks, the ones with "Original" means I had to alter the original image, typically to make them square, but I always keep the originals. If it says "Original," I don't add it to the songs' metadata in MusicBee; just the altered versions.

With a filenaming scheme this detailed, is there a way for MusicBee to automatically save the images into each song's metadata like I have them organized in the folder already? I realize how niche this sort of feature would be, but I figured there's no hurt in asking. Thank you for your input!

[Mayibongwe]

Hey there,

With a filenaming scheme this detailed, is there a way for MusicBee to automatically save the images into each song's metadata like I have them organized in the folder already?
I realize how niche this sort of feature would be, but I figured there's no hurt in asking. Thank you for your input!

At first glance, I would think:
No, there's no way to automate that at the moment - try logging this request in the wishlist board, instead.

But before taking my word for it:
You could have a look at and play around with the settings in Edit > Edit Preferences > Tags (1) > artwork.

I have never had to make use of those, but see how the different retrieval options like *.* (or a custom template) operate.
At most, you would get all the desired artwork showing up, but they most likely wouldn't be auto-assigned to the desired picture types (e.g album cover back)

[JBeebs528491]

Hello,

Thank you for your reply. I will try playing around with those settings to see what, if anything, happens. I could be wrong, but I believe that is for artwork that is retrieved via MusicBee, not pre-downloaded images. I hope it works with local files.

I hope I can set up some sort of filename template that matches what I already have. I originally had them as the same names as the songs they are attributed to with the variants suffixed in a similar way to what they are now, but I wanted to keep the MP3s separate from the JPGs when viewing in a file explorer.

I don't wholly care about the 'Album Cover' and 'Album Cover (back)' labels as much as the auto-embedding itself. The way things work now, if I need to update the front cover for every song, I have to overwrite all the main album artwork for all the songs, than re-add all the single artwork to each song one-by-one after that. Unlike the one I used in my example, this isn't the case with most albums, but it's still annoying and tedious regardless. All it takes is one image or song to restart the process all over again.

I will try out your suggestion and see what kind of conclusion I come to. Hopefully, the worst it comes to is renaming all the artwork to fit a filenaming template MusicBee can read, which I can automate with a program since everything is already in a given format. If unsuccessful, I'll put in a request to the wishlist board.

Thank you again for reading and offering a potential solution.