Rounded Artwork

[Mayibongwe]

Download link: here

I haven't found a way to manipulate the album covers on the Track Information panel.
But this seems to work for all other locations (as far as the layouts I primarily use are concerned).

I've borrowed the code from here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1758762/how-to-create-image-with-rounded-corners-in-c

The background colour and radius of the stripped corners can be overridden using:
...MusicBee\AppData\mb_RoundedArtwork\Skins

NB: This does not and will not replace the actual artwork on your music files.

Supported features (descriptions commented out in gray):
 
 
 

I would like to have the album artworks with rounded corners just like on Apple Music for example.

But I'd really wish we would have an options to turn sightly rounded corners on album artwork.

is it possible to round album covers (corners) in the main panel by 15px. and increase even more the distance between album covers.?

[aktor]

Doesn't work. I have 3.6.9100 version.

[hiccup]

Very nice Mayibongwe.
It never crossed my mind that this could be done wilt a plugin. Very creative.
And it works very well out-of-the box, with no effort required of the user.

Me being kind of a stickler for preferring to see things as they actually are I probably won't be using this myself, but I'm sure many users will enjoy this–what they often call 'modern'–look.

[Artesoll]

It didn't work, but it was worth a try.
It's important to always be thinking about evolving while designing.
Who knows, maybe in the future it will be an option for the application itself.

[hiccup]

It's important to always be thinking about evolving while designing.

MusicBee is pretty much about showing things as they are.
If artwork is rounded, it will show up as rounded.
If it is square, it will show up square.
Modifying or disfiguring 'artist intent' is not evolvement. (in the sense of making things better)

[Mayibongwe]

Thanks hiccup. I can't remember what I was looking for under the cache folder when I spotted those album covers and manually modified one as a test.
When it worked, I then remembered the wishlist request for the rounded corners. There seems to be quite a bit that plugins can help with.
I'm not able to round the artwork in the Track Info panel because that seems to be displayed at full resolution - directly from the tracks and not cached artwork.

Doesn't work. I have 3.6.9100 version.

There's an Activity.log file under ...MusicBee\AppData\mb_RoundedArtwork
Can you let me know what that says? (you too Artesoll)

[Artesoll]

Thanks hiccup. I can't remember what I was looking for under the cache folder when I spotted those album covers and manually modified one as a test.
When it worked, I then remembered the wishlist request for the rounded corners. There seems to be quite a bit that plugins can help with.
I'm not able to round the artwork in the Track Info panel because that seems to be displayed at full resolution - directly from the tracks and not cached artwork.

Doesn't work. I have 3.6.9100 version.

There's an Activity.log file under ...MusicBee\AppData\mb_RoundedArtwork
Can you let me know what that says? (you too Artesoll)

It says ( Initializing plugin...
Skin loaded: Divine Light)

My version is 3.6.9083

[karbock]

Nicely done, Mayinbongwe!
It's working straight out-of-the-box here (3.6.9091 P).

@aktor, @artesoll
Just in case: you won't instantly see the difference for all the album covers, as they are adapted one by one in the background.

[aktor]

Activity log
Initializing plugin...
Skin loaded: Luna

[Mayibongwe]

@aktor, @artesoll - thanks for that info.

After the skin gets loaded, the plugin will attempt to get a list of all files under ...AppData\InternalCache\AlbumCovers
Not sure yet why it wouldn't get past that phase. But can you:

- reset the artwork cache by deleting the above folder
- then also deleting  ...MusicBee\AppData\mb_RoundedArtwork\Database.dat
- restarting MusicBee so that it rebuilds its original non-rounded artwork
- after that, restart it once more to get the plugin to reprocess the artwork

[aktor]

There is no Database.dat only skins folder and activity.log

[Mayibongwe]

That wasn't my brightest moment - that file won't exist yet because the plugin hadn't reached that point as yet.
But that's fine then, proceed with the restarts after deleting the folder in step 1, and see if that does it.

[aktor]

Doesn't work.

[BoringName]

Worked ok for me.

I noticed it effectively creates a copy of all your artwork in AppData\mb_RoundedArtwork\temp for all libraries, not just the one that is currently active.

I imagine that might take up a lot of space if you have a large library.

It also created 9 copies in this folder for the cover for Nirvana Nevermind 30th anniversary, which is a bit weird because there are 13 tracks on the album. It's listed as a single album in Musicbee.

It's grabbing the album covers from AppData\InternalCache which has the 9 nirvana covers in there so the plugin didn't cause that problem, it's probably my terrible test library.....

The InternalCache folder is only there on the portable version of Musicbee. There is no InternalCache folder in C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\MusicBee so it's probably not working for people running the installed version.

edit: I've only had 4 hours sleep in the last 2 days so I'm probably missing something but I can't see anything in the source code that tells Musicbee to display the rounded temp images instead of the original artwork. How are you doing that? Nevermind, I see it.

edit2: If it helps. the internalcache folder for the installed version is located here on my machine
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\MusicBee\InternalCache

[aktor]

I have installer version. I copied internal cache folder in to appdata\roamin\musicbee folder and it created temp folder with png files (not rounded) and database.dat.
Initializing plugin...
Skin loaded: Luna
Creating database
Rounded artwork created: 2301
But it sill doesn't work.
You probably need to create separate plugins for portable and installer version.