No Artist pictures shows up

Hello everyone,

I’m new to volumio and I have a problem. I can’t see pictures of the artist in the artist overview.
What do I do wrong. Do I have to place a picture somewhere in a folder?
Thank you very much for your help.

Best
Thorsten

I think that these are downloaded from the Internet (please correct me some one if this is not the case). Does your device definitely have internet access?

Thank you for your response, chsims1

Yes the device has definetly internet access. There are a five pictures in the artist overview, but they are far away from beeing the artist picture. And the artists aren’t something very exotic. e.g. there is Queen, Pink Floyd and other popular artists. The files are tagged with mp3tag.

I haven’t used the Browse by Artists link very much, but thought I’d give it a try and had the same result as you. About 5% of the artists had images, the rest did not, and it seemed the more obscure artists were more likely to have images than well known ones.

So, I brought up the code and took a look at the logic to get an Artist’s artwork. It turns out that the code makes a call to the albumart function passing in the name of the artist, followed by the name of the artist as the “album”. So that’s why Blondie, Asia, The Eagles and others have images for me - they all have albums by their band name.

This must be a bug from day one in the code base, but I’m not familiar with the albumart server enough to fix it. Here’s the guilty part:

ControllerMpd.prototype.getAlbumArt = function (data, path,icon) {

	var artist, album;

	if (data != undefined && data.path != undefined) {
		path = this.sanitizeUri(data.path);
	}

	var web;

	if (data != undefined && data.artist != undefined) {
		artist = data.artist;
		if (data.album != undefined)
			album = data.album;
		else album = data.artist;

		web = '?web=' + nodetools.urlEncode(artist) + '/' + nodetools.urlEncode(album) + '/large'
	}

	var url = '/albumart';

	if (web != undefined)
		url = url + web;

	if (web != undefined && path != undefined)
		url = url + '&';
	else if (path != undefined)
		url = url + '?';

	if (path != undefined)
		url = url + 'path=' + nodetools.urlEncode(path);

    if(icon!==undefined)
    {
        if(url==='/albumart')
            url=url+'?icon='+icon;
        else url=url+'&icon='+icon;
    }



    return url;
};

Tested your hypothesis with Clanned as they do have Artist art in my Volumio and have an album by the name of Clanned and several other ones.

When I right click on the album art image, select show image I get the following URL:
[IP of Volumio]/albumart?web=Clannad/Clannad/large&icon=fa-users

When I then change the album bit to no album I get the default image:
[IP of Volumio]/albumart?web=Clannad/large&icon=fa-users
(so it seems the album art server needs an album name)

However when I use another Clanned album:
[IP of Volumio]/albumart?web=Clannad/Macalla/large&icon=fa-users

I get to see an image as well…

When I then tested with Pink Floyd I got this URL:
[IP of Volumio]/albumart?web=Pink%2520Floyd/Pink%2520Floyd/large&icon=fa-users

No image was shown and I am not very trusty of the %2520 and it seems that this happens since the URL is first encoded for spaces (%20) and then reencoded again with encodes the % sign as %25. When I manually checked:
[IP of Volumio]/albumart?web=Pink%20Floyd/Pink%20Floyd/large&icon=fa-users

it showed an artist image of Pink Floyd… So it seems that some sort of double encoding is happening. I have tried making changes in ‘app/plugins/music_service/mpd/index.js’, however these are not reflected in the UI. Do I need to restart the webservice and if so how?

if (data != undefined && data.artist != undefined) {
                artist = data.artist;
                if (data.album != undefined)
                        album = data.album;
                else album = data.artist;

                //web = '?web=' + nodetools.urlEncode(artist) + '/' + nodetools.urlEncode(album) + '/large'
                web = '?web=' + artist + '/' + album + '/large'
 }

Made a quick hack by removing the encoding in the function. Restart was ‘service volumio restart’ and presto a lot more artist images are coming up. It needs more looking at than this, since I have no idea where the second encoding origanates, plus artists that have an ‘&’ in the bandname also still do not show up…

The images are retrieved from an API service of Last.fm, using a Node module, “album-art”, to interface to it. The album-art module is being called in app/plugins/miscellanea/albumart/albumart.js in line 91. Volumio needs to pass in a value of “null” (not the string ‘null’) for the album name to get the artist image, but the current code will never do that, and you can’t simulate it via the Web interface with any URL.

You can install the Node module on your Mac or PC and run it with a CLI to see what it will return:

github.com/lacymorrow/album-art

Now go ahead and get Clannad’s artist image:

macbookpro-jimambras:~ altamontstudios$ album-art clannad mega
lastfm-img2.akamaized.net/i/u/d … b53ede.png

Nice to see there is a “mega” size option, that would provide much higher image quality for Volumio’s UI.

Guys, I am lurking and following closely your developments, thanks for helping us!

hi

This does not make sense to me in the view “artist” to display the album images,
Above all these via the WEB.
Usually the covers are included in the TAGS of the files. So it would be useful to display the album folder from there and it would also only be useful in the album view, because which cover for an artist is shown in a compilation?

There should be a reasonable possibility to either use the local media information from the files or, alternatively, search for media information on the internet.

The Hires Player Ibasso DX80 makes such excellent, all information is extracted from the TAG information.

We tried to extract the info from ID3 tag, but this was causing looooots of performances issues, especially on NAS (the whole file needs to be read in order to get the ID3 tag, therefore it needs to be downloaded entirely).

Also, in the artist view we don’t know where the actual file is, and therefore there we can only use infos retrieved from internet.
For everything else we do: if there is an image in the folder use it, if not look on internet

Would not it be possible to save the selected cover in the database? This would hinder the read-in process only a little since the format, title, album anyway from the file are read out.
Of the 729 albums on the NAS, there are 214 images in the artist view, but about 80% of them with completely wrong pictures

Could it be a workaround to provide an artist view picture in a webart (sub)folder with the artists name manually and to use the internet lookup only, if no such file ist found? For example “Leonard Cohen.jpeg” (or something like “artist - Leonard Cohen.jpeg” to separate it from album art picture).
I expect that there would be no such performance penalty.

how do we get local artist artwork to appear? nothing works

1 Like

Hello

Digging this thread up rather starting anew…

System 2.389

I am now having problems with some Artist artwork not showing, and displaying Last.fm picture. I dont recall seeing this problem before I recently updated the system.

Screenshot 2018-05-26 12.14.49.png

I have however over the last few weeks gone through all my albums and made them FLAC. I have found a few errors in Tags, and picture problems and fixed these (I believe) but still mystified about the generic artist pictures. Weirdly its not some of my less main stream stuff. Eg, Rolling Stones, Beatles, The Kinks.
I know some of this Artist Artwork was displaying before.

What have I checked;
Deleted Recycle Bins/Spotlight searches/trash etc
Checked Tags for consistency Eg, Beatles, The, rather than The Beatles or Beatles mix
Changed/corrected Album Artwork
Added/ changed Artwork in folder if necessary

So… What Have I missed/ changed/ not checked. Or has my recent update got slightly different Artwork search parameters?

Thanks for your help

Wheaty

Ahhh…

Just noticed its only the Albums that are displayed as;

Artist, The

Some more TLC required. I’m sure the correct format is listed in a forum post some where… I’ll have another look.

Thanks.