Re: [Banshee-List] Need feature back: manually set album art

[Nicholas Doyle <niskel gmail com>]

On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 13:06 -0400, Andrew Conkling wrote:
> I'm not sure what CJK is, but adding a file named "cover" or "folder"
> in the directory with the tracks should introduce the art to Banshee;
> you should never have to mess with the cache folder itself.
> 
> If you try that, does it work for you?

CJK is "Chinese, Japanese, and Korean". So basically problems with
unicode characters. I have been having a number of personal gripes with
the cover-art system as it is in it's current form.

If I had my way, The best way to store covers in the cache folders is to
have a hash of album artist and album title. The string to hash would be
include the album artist and album title as they appear in the
metadata /verbatim/. This means no stripping unicode, no stripping
parenthesis, no converting to lower case because all of these characters
are essential to properly identify an album uniquely. The use of a hash
allows for the files to be stored easily without needing to worry about
filesystem characters that aren't supported.

As far as using album artist and album title verbatim, this is very
important.


Stripping parenthesis breaks the following albums:
Nine Inch Nails - We're In This Together (Green)
Nine Inch Nails - We're In This Together (Orange)
Nine Inch Nails - We're In This Together (Yellow)
Sigur Rós - ( ) 

Stripping unicode breaks CJK and for example:
Justice - †


If I didn't want parts of my metadata used to identify a track or album,
I wouldn't have put it in there to begin with. If cover art detection is
broken because I have parenthesis in my metadata then perhaps it is the
metadata that should be fixed, not the cover art detection that should
be adapted to people who can't tag their music correctly.

Also, trying to track down cover art and place a cover.jpg or a
folder.jpg in an album's folder is a PITA and broken for a number of
reasons. Firstly, what if I have a read-only music library. This is
common when sharing music over a network. Secondly, it doesn't even
seem to work in a foolproof manner; if cover art for an album is
already in the cache from auto-detection it seems to be used by
default in my experience. I should be able to edit all aspects of a
track or album from within banshee, I shouldn't have to rely on
moving files around on the filesystem. Having a GUI to manually set
cover art simply just logical and, in my opinion, very necessary.