Attached art for WMA files doesn't display in Gnome 3 under certain conditions

[Alan Ansell <aansell fastmail fm>]

Hi everyone,

 

I hope this is the correct place to be posting this. If not perhaps some kind soul will redirect accordingly.

 

I've noticed a curious problem on a new install of Fedora 23 running Gnome 3.18.2

 

I've set up a cifs mounted share to a music library on a Windows machine. I'd been having trouble getting any player of choice to display attached (not folder) artwork on particular individual tracks. Those problematic tracks are all WMA, and are only certain ones.

 

The reason I think the problem has to do with gnome and not, say, my share, cifs or my player is this:

 

To check why I was having said problems in the player, I opened up the mounted folder in Nautilus to view the files. It defaulted to a tiled view where I could see mostly folders (albums, displayed as default folder icons) and the individual tracks, almost all of which had thumbnails depicting the track/album art. Problematic files (there are only a few) have the default overlay icon of a green quaver.

 

I browsed to a problem file and did two things. I selected to play it in Videos - the default packaged player - where it showed the attached album art while playing. I then opened the file in Kid3-qt, where it again showed the attached artwork.

 

What I can confirm with regard to the problem files is this: since my library was assembled through years of using Windows, the WMAs have migrated from Windows Media Player, via my player of choice, and via a Windows tag editor where I have often removed a lot of the ghastly crap that Windows attaches. The problem files do not have any of their meta-tags class [WM/MEDIAPRIMARYCLASSID] attached, and which will often take the following form:

 

[WM/MEDIAPRIMARYCLASSID {D1607DBC-E323-4BE2-86A1-48A42A28441E}] where that hex value is some idiotic nonsense that Windows comes up with and tries to tie those music files to an online store (among other things). Note however, that whichever tags each WMA file does or does not have, it DOES have attached art., and which art shows up in tag editors.

 

I accept that it's my fault these tags are missing, but  find it curious that in some way, Gnome fully supports those WMA files that retain their full [WM/*] tags, and will play the others but not display correct thumbnails, despite ALL WMA files having attached artwork.

 

Is there some other form of tag I could create? Or is there a package I need to download or some other plugin that might solve this annoying but not exactly critical issue?

 

alan ansell figurative painting
Itzac
France

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