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winxi · 16-09-2013, 22:10

Is there a specific reason that folder.* files have higher priority than cover.* files? If it isn't problematic, it may be worth considering to interchange these two in the list of priorities.
The reason is that when using the Windows Media Player with default settings, it downloads album art from the internet and stores it as 'Folder.jpg' in the album directory. These 'Folder.jpg' files are saved as hidden system files and are of quite low resolution, typically in the scale of a few kB. If one now manually stores high resolution album art as 'cover.jpg', MinimServer will unexpectedly provide the low resolution album art from the WMP. Not a big thing, but it took me some time to figure this out and since the WMP seems to be widely used, it is likely that some other user may experience this as well.

simoncn · 16-09-2013, 23:04

(16-09-2013 22:10)winxi Wrote: Is there a specific reason that folder.* files have higher priority than cover.* files? If it isn't problematic, it may be worth considering to interchange these two in the list of priorities.
The reason is that when using the Windows Media Player with default settings, it downloads album art from the internet and stores it as 'Folder.jpg' in the album directory. These 'Folder.jpg' files are saved as hidden system files and are of quite low resolution, typically in the scale of a few kB. If one now manually stores high resolution album art as 'cover.jpg', MinimServer will unexpectedly provide the low resolution album art from the WMP. Not a big thing, but it took me some time to figure this out and since the WMP seems to be widely used, it is likely that some other user may experience this as well.

The reason why folder.* has the highest priority is that many other music servers use Folder.jpg for cover art and many users have created their libraries with their preferred cover art files named as Folder.jpg.

Is it possible to prevent WMP from doing this by adjusting its settings? If so, this seems like the best solution.

winxi · 17-09-2013, 07:42

(16-09-2013 23:04)simoncn Wrote: The reason why folder.* has the highest priority is that many other music servers use Folder.jpg for cover art and many users have created their libraries with their preferred cover art files named as Folder.jpg.

I think that the popularity of 'Folder.jpg' is the reason to assign it to a lower priority. This would make it possible to use high resolution album art for MinimServer (cover.jpg) while not interfering with other libraries which force 'Folder.jpg', e.g. the one from WMP. At the same time it wouldn't cause problems for users who use just 'Folder.jpg'.

Quote:Is it possible to prevent WMP from doing this by adjusting its settings? If so, this seems like the best solution.

Yes, ist is possible and I've already done it. So it isn't a problem for me, but it may be for other users. As soon as one starts WMP it will start saving the 'Folder.jpg' files for any album which doesn't have embedded album art or an existing 'Folder.jpg' file.

I would appreciate any comment from other users how they handle and store the album art. Previously I've put embedded album art in every file, but now I want to remove as much redundancy as possible from my library. So I've decided to store just one image file in each album directory. This also has the advantage that it is much easier to edit or exchange the album art. The '<albumname>.jpg' sounds promising, but it will cause problems as soon as <albumname> contains special characters which are not allowed in the file system in use. So I ended up with using one 'cover.jpg' file for each album.
How do other users handle this? Is there a best practice to handle album art?

simoncn · 17-09-2013, 10:21

(17-09-2013 07:42)winxi Wrote: I think that the popularity of 'Folder.jpg' is the reason to assign it to a lower priority. This would make it possible to use high resolution album art for MinimServer (cover.jpg) while not interfering with other libraries which force 'Folder.jpg', e.g. the one from WMP. At the same time it wouldn't cause problems for users who use just 'Folder.jpg'.

This seems backwards to me. The accepted standard is Folder.jpg, and I think MinimServer should give the highest priority to the accepted standard. It would be confusing and undesirable for MinimServer to introduce a different preferred naming convention for high-resolution images.

The recognition of cover.* was added to accommodate users who had this naming convention in their libraries based on their previous usage of other server software. It was intentionally made lower priority so that it would not interfere with the recognition of Folder.jpg files.

Quote:The '<albumname>.jpg' sounds promising, but it will cause problems as soon as <albumname> contains special characters which are not allowed in the file system in use.

There was some discussion on the Linn forums some time ago about tagging the image file with the full album name to solve this problem of illegal filesystem characters. This might be a useful improvement to the current MinimServer support for '<albumname>.jpg'. Another option would be to have some convention for how to map the album name into a valid filename.

winxi · 17-09-2013, 20:51

(17-09-2013 10:21)simoncn Wrote: There was some discussion on the Linn forums some time ago about tagging the image file with the full album name to solve this problem of illegal filesystem characters. This might be a useful improvement to the current MinimServer support for '<albumname>.jpg'.

This sounds interesting. I could also imagine it the other way round, to tag the audio file with the name of the image file. However, I'm quite satisfied with my 'cover.jpg' files. The only disadvantage with this is that it is more difficult to distinguish the album art files.

Quote:Another option would be to have some convention for how to map the album name into a valid filename.

Do you think that there is a simple way to map all possible album names into a valid and unique file name? Ideally, this mapping would preserve the meaning of the album name. A step into this direction would be to map accented vowels to the unaccented counterparts, etc.

simoncn · 17-09-2013, 21:36

(17-09-2013 20:51)winxi Wrote: Do you think that there is a simple way to map all possible album names into a valid and unique file name? Ideally, this mapping would preserve the meaning of the album name. A step into this direction would be to map accented vowels to the unaccented counterparts, etc.

Accented characters shouldn't be a problem for modern filesystems, assuming the locale charset is UTF-8. The problem characters will be things like ? / \ : ( ) * etc. It might be OK to replace all these by underscores, as the resulting name is unlikely to be ambiguous.

simoncn · 17-09-2013, 21:59

Taking the nonambiguous idea a step further, perhaps the album art filename could be any nonambiguous subset of the album name. The filename would only need to be nonambiguous with respect to albums in the same folder.

This album art file (if it exists) would be ahead of folder.* in the priority list.