How can i get my album art back?

January 7, 2009 on 2:57 am | In mybachcars.com |

:help:
first off, i'd like to thank everyone who has been involved in the xbmc project. it's a wonderful piece of work!

her's my problem:

i ripped all my cds into a shared folder my home pc and i stream them to the home stereo via xbmc. i spent quite a few hours retrieving the album art via the info function in xbmc and had it displaying nicely on the tv screen whenever i chose the particular smb share containg all my music. tonight i upgraded to the latest build and now my album art won't display. i have a folder called albums on my xbox which contains all the art in .tbn format and those will render nicely when clicked on. how do i associate the .tbn art in the xbox album folder with the actual albums in my smb share?

many thanks for any help with this issue!

did you delete any of the db files in the xbmc/album folder?

check in your music settings for an option titled something similar to "enable thumbs from network shares" and make sure it's switched so that thumbs from network shares will be read.

first try clearing your database, or rescanning (this clears first anyway). the database now contains links to where the thumbs are to speed things up.

kmtv,

i'm wondering if you've found a solution to this problem yet? i can empathize with your frustration.

i also have had some issues with album art and network shares, but before stating them, let me echo your praises for xmbc... it truly is a wonderful bit of software, and may quite literally be the greatest invention since the wheel.

having said that, i've been perplexed by the following:

my albums which i have stored on my pc list nicely via 'my music' over the smb network share, and a (lengthy) cddb scan has added art for most all of the titles which came up without any after the initial scan of that shared folder. however... i've noticed that each time i launch xmbc, go to 'my music', and navigate to that shared folder, the "scanning for" message displays again on the screen, and if i don't cancel it, takes a very long time to complete - several minutes - depending on which precise folder is being scanned, and how many albums or mp3's are in it (my 'full albums' folder has a few hundred titles, and my other misc mp3 folders - 80's, 90's, jazz, etc. - have a few hundred songs each as well). if i do cancel the scan (so that i can start playing my music), all the albums display the same art (presumably the first title's). the initial lengthy scan seems a small price to pay for being able to display all the art, but having it take so long each time after that, is not very practical when you want to just fire up the box and play some tunes.

is this situation normal? does everyone have to wait for this progress bar to complete each time they go to their shared folder, or am i missing something?

would that be the same thing as the process the new build went through automatically when i navigated to the pc share? it said it was updating (i assumed because of changes in the new build).

if not, i'll try it tonight. i'm at work and the xbox is at home...

thanks for all your help. i'll let you know how things work out.

nope, they're all still there. specifically mymusic6.db in the root of the albums folder. it weighs in at 1.47 meg in size, so i assume it's intact. there are cddb, thumbs and playlist folders within "albums" also. the thumbs folder is full of all my .tbn images.

i appreciate your reply and am thankful for any help on getting this art re-associated with the actual music.

possibly. it doesn't do a complete rescan though. a complete rescan would be best.

went into music settings and cleaned the database, then went into music and did a full rescan. xbmc found the music in my pc's shared folder, but there's still no album art showing up in any view.

it's very frustrating to be able to see all those images stored in my albums folder, but not to be able to associate them with the actual music files.

i'll keep working on it and will report hereif i get it fixed...

any further suggestions are greatly appreciated. thanks for the help!

i've tried that particular setting both ways (only because i saw reference to it in a previous thread here). just to be sure i'm making myself clear-the album art folder is stored on the xbox. the music is stored on a share on my home pc. worked flawlessly until i upgraded to the 3/7 xbmc. i'm sure it's something simple that i'm overlooking. somehow i need to let the one folder be aware of the other.

thanks for the suggestion-i really appreciate the help!

nope, i never did solve the problem. after trying everthing i could think of, i finally decided that the best way to fix the problem and to avoid it in the future was to re-download all the album art and store each image in the appropriate shared folder. if you store the art as a file called folder.jpg, xbmc will pick it up on a scan and store it in its database. although it was a lengthy process to dl all the art again, i now have the benefit of the art files being entirely portable and immune from any issues in the future. i tend to upgrade to more current versions of xbmc every month or so, so i no longer need to worry about losing my associations when upgrading. i've also been able to get better quality art from amazon, allmusic or google images so that the album covers look better on my big screen.

btw, i used a program called "album art tool" on the pc and it was a big help in redoing the art. definitely worth checking out.

as for your scanning problem, i'm can't say where it's coming from. a one time scan of my 800 or so albums takes about 20 minutes, but after that i can navigate to the shared pc folder and have the image art up in maybe 15-20 seconds. i'll do some playing around with different settings to see if i can replicate your problem.

again, thanks to the xbmc team for a great piece of work and also to all those who chimed in with suggestions.

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