Feature: Expose fallback album art file(s) list to Configuration.JSON

[victormatheusEK]

I have some albums where the music files don't have any artwork in itselves, but there is a jpg file with the album artwork on the album folder, but harmonoid doesn't seem to use it to set the album artwork on the application.

Would it be possible to set the app to search for the jpg (or any other image file type) in the album folder when this happens?

[alexmercerind]

Hi @victormatheusEK,

This is already possible in Harmonoid. Make sure to turn on "Lookup for fallback album arts" in the Settings.

These images in the folder will be searched (following the priority):

  'Folder.jpg',
  'Folder.png',
  'AlbumArtSmall.jpg',
  'AlbumArt.jpg',
  'Album.jpg',
  '.folder.png',
  'cover.jpg',
  'cover.png',
  'cover.gif',
  'front.jpg',
  'front.png',
  'front.gif',
  'front.bmp',
  'thumb.jpg'

Thanks!

[alexmercerind]

It should note that it is although marked as experimental, works perfectly fine.

[Not-Sure-Whats-Going-On]

Is it possible to also add 'folder.jpg' to the list please?
I'm on Linux, so case sensitive, and all of my external album-art files are called 'folder.jpg.
Thanks for making this great player!

[Not-Sure-Whats-Going-On]

Thanks!

[alexmercerind]

Hi @Not-Sure-Whats-Going-On!

I will add it to the list. However, Folder.jpg is "the standard". You can refer to these lines in VLC's source code:

https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/e3b28612d38f925d92f9d7fd45ee6b337fe2dfe5/modules/meta_engine/folder.c#L40-L55

---

Besides this, next release might take some time to come out. There's a lot of stuff going on. Thanks!

[victormatheusEK]

@alexmercerind This search for the artwork is case-sensitive? Because in my folder it has a Cover.jpg with an uppercase 'C'. The cover is not appearing on the albums even though I switched on the option and reindexed the files.

If it is case-sensitive, I know the solution is as simple as renaming the file, but wouldn't it be troublesome if it happens to several albums?

[Not-Sure-Whats-Going-On]

Until only a few months ago I always used the standard Folder.jpg but recently had to change ~3500 files to folder.jpg in order to get a different player I was testing to display the images. In the end I didn't like the player and deleted it but the end result was a bunch of files with the wrong name. That'll teach me :-)

As an experiment I just renamed the external albumart of one album to Folder.jpg and refreshed the library and I can confirm that it displays OK in Album View mode. However, both the album thumbnail in the play-bar and on the "Modern Now-Playing" screen is just the default placeholder so it seems that renaming the external image files doesn't help there. Am I missing something?

[alexmercerind]

This search for the artwork is case-sensitive?
Because in my folder it has a Cover.jpg with an uppercase 'C'.
The cover is not appearing on the albums even though I switched on the option and reindexed the files.

If it is case-sensitive, I know the solution is as simple as renaming the file, but wouldn't it be troublesome if it happens to several albums?

TL;DR

Best idea: Expose this "fallback album arts" list in the Configuration.JSON & let users decide.

And add this to UI too once I get time.

---

Currently, the fallback album arts are "looked-up" at the time of rendering. In other words:

• The embedded album arts are cached during the first time indexing (because we can't extract them each time, very expensive).
• The fallback album arts are not cached but looked at the time of rendering itself (in a "chained" fashion, list is given above).

If embedded album art is not found, Harmonoid looks for fallback album arts. 'Folder.jpg' exists? Use it. Not exists? ... 'Folder.png'exists? Use it. Not exists? ... 'AlbumArtSmall.jpg'exists? Use it. Not exists? ... 'AlbumArt.jpg' exists? Use it. Not exists? ... .

What this means is that, if you remove or add the "fallback album art" in your folder, Harmonoid should be able to see the changes without any "re-index" because it is being done at the time of rendering. However... as you can tell that checking existence of a File is an I/O operation, which can add redundant delay & jitter in the UI.

• One solution can be to iterate over the files in the music file's directory, however, iterating is going to be even worse.
  Some lazy lads like me just throw all the files in same folder & let music player do the job 😄.
• Another solution can be let's say I check for "non-case sensitive file existence" on GNU/Linux filesystem, this means 2^(n - 1) checks for each file name, where (n - 1) is the length of file name excluding . (e.g. Folder.jpg).

Best idea: Expose this "fallback album arts" list in the Configuration.JSON & let users decide. All of the Harmonoid's configuration is present in ~/.Harmonoid/Configuration.JSON, it also gives ability to set custom libmpv flags etc. etc.

[alexmercerind]

Hi @victormatheusEK & @Not-Sure-Whats-Going-On,

Please install the latest nightly build.
You'll be able to configure the fallback album arts. It's in ~/.Harmonoid/Configuration.JSON. I'll add this to UI in future.

Thanks! Happy new year! 🎊

---

Since, this is a nightly build, few things might not work as intended (though I feel it's fairly stable).
I'm working actively to ensure stability & feature completeness of Harmonoid. Thanks for using it!

Leaving issue opened till next stable release.

[alexmercerind]

Just wanted to say that keyboard shortcuts are broken in this build.

[alexmercerind]

v0.3.5 is released. Download latest version.