User Upstream Images not showing with artist if name contains special character(s)

[Niko]

Hi there,
recently I began to feed the directory [OS-specific/]uMediaLibrary-v4/AssetUserUpstreamImages with selected PNG-files which match the names of the relative Album Artists. As expected, these picture files are shown in the Album Artist view (e.g. Album Artist /Album).

When the first picture was missing, I tried various methods (updating a MacOS created photo under Windows and vice versa) to ensure a correctly created PNG-file, but was not successful.

Having prepared now about 50 pictures, I think I have found the common reason for the missing pictures: If the artist's name contains one or more "special" character(s), like German "Umlaut" and/or accented characters, the picture will not be displayed. Examples for such names are "Alois Mühlbacher" (counter tenor), "André Heller" (writer, composer, singer), "André Previn" (conductor) and "André Rieu" (violinist and conductor).

My actual setup is QNAP server and iPad with the Naim app as control point. After new pictures were uploaded, Asset was restarted and in the Naim app the album cover cache was initialized, most of the uploaded pictures were shown together with the related (Album) Artist (and in the Artist view as well).

Is there anything I can do on my end or will this need a correction in a following version of Asset ?

Thank you in advance.

[Spoon]

Re: User Upstream Images not showing with artist if name contains special character(s

Try:

Andre Heller

[Niko]

Re: User Upstream Images not showing with artist if name with special character(s)

Try:

Andre Heller

Thank you for your prompt reply. Obviously, as the name suggested by you does no more contain any special character, this solution should succeed; but it gave me also the possibility to understand the dependencies better - in this case by which variable the connection to the relative picture was established. So I found out that neither changing the directory name (Album Artist) and/or the name of a single track lead to the expected result, only if I changed the metadata field values things developed as expected.

But now the story became interesting: To ensure equal spelling, I copied the directory name (still "André Heller") into the Album Artist tag and updated all tracks of a disk. To ensure that this change was as expected, I open ed the relative tracks again and found "Andre? Heller" as Album Artist. For explanation: I usually do such maintenance works on a Mac, thus using dBpoweramp 15.8 on this platform. The reason is that the handling of pictures (cropping etc.) seems easier to me on a Mac, and therefore I used FileZilla on the Mac as well to upload the pictures then to the QNAP server.

Normally the workflow is as follows: CDs are ripped on a Windows PC using dBpoweramp (now 17.0) to a local drive, then tested with Perfect Tunes against the large database of about 30.000 tracks (to correct eventual misspelling etc.) and finally moved to the QNAP server. At the time the André Heller-CDs were ripped, this was done on a Naim Unity Serve, which I had for testing purposes. Later I found out that metadata were stored within a separate "Black Box" - meaning that I had only the ripped WAV files without any metadata, although I had done some investigations to ensure correct metadata values. For these CDs I added the metadata manually - it was the time of dBpoweramp 14.0. At this time I stored my music library on a Synology server. When Perfect Tunes became available, I did some maintenance work, mainly by eliminating redundancies in the spelling of Artist names, potential abbreviations, harmonizing differently spelled Composers (Russian names are spelled differently in the English speaking world compared to German speaking countries) etc. Later on I changed from Synology to QNAP as this was recommended by Naim dealer.

Thus some moves of the data took place, since maintenance was made on the platform where least effort was to be expected for a particular step (Windows / Mac / QNAP / Synology), resulting that even if a certain special character looked identical on the screen, it does not mean that it is stored as the exactly same hexadecimal value.

The further steps were now:
1. Contents of Artist and Album Artist tag changed to "Andre Heller" on all relative tracks, picture file name (via File Zilla on Mac) accordingly --> picture now visible
2. directory name changed back to "André Heller", name copied and pasted to all relative Artist and Album Artist tags
3. installed FileZilla also on Windows PC, directory "André Heller" pated also to picture file on QNAP in .../AssetUserUpstreamImages
4. restarted Asset, updated image cache, and now picture correctly visible !
5. copied directory name of "André Previn" to Artist / Album Artist tags where applicable, pasted also name to picture file - Asset restarted, image cache updated --> SUCCESS !!!
6. found that now "André Rieu" (still not "harmonized") appears in FileZilla before "André Heller" and "André Previn" = final prove that "é" must have different stored values
7. same procedure now for "André Rieu" and "Alois Mühlbacher" - works now fully as expected :-)))

Sorry for having caused avoidable effort. For that reason I have tried to explain in detail how others could correct similar issues if they use similar hard- and/or software structure.
Lessons learned: To avoid different values of special characters, try to use strictly the same hardware for maintenance works.

Best regards.