PerfectTunes Album Art Basic Questions

[GeeBee]

I have been playing with the unregistered version of PerfectTunes using a test folder that contains 18 albums by a single artist along with some single songs. The folder is organized with subfolders for each album (e.g. Artist/Album) with a couple multi CD sets that have subfolders under the album for each disc (e.g. Artist/Album/Disc 1 and Artist/Album/Disc 2, etc.). The songs that are not part of an album are located in the root Artist folder. Some of those single songs have album information and some don’t.

Some of the songs have embedded covers, some are in a folder that has a folder.jpg file and some have neither. In the past I have primarily been using Window Media Player to listen to my music so the albums with a folder.jpg have shown the cover art. Now that I have an iPhone, I have been using iTunes. When I imported the folder for this artist into iTunes, the songs with embedded art worked but the covers for the songs that did not have the embedded art did not show up. That is what led me to try PerfectTunes.

When I ran PerfectTunes, it said one album had no album cover. That was one of the multi CD sets where: (i) the cover was embedded in some of the songs but not all of them and (ii) the cover art jpg was not called folder.jpg or cover.jpg and was contained in the album folder while the mp3s were in the album/disc 1 and album disc 2 folders. Because some of the songs had the embedded cover art, the cover art did show up in iTunes. That is why I thought it strange that it was the only album that PerfectTunes said had no album art. I assume that the reason PerfectTunes said this album had no album art was due to one or both of: (1) most but not all of the songs had the embedded art; and/or (2) the jpg with the cover art was not called folder.jpg or cover.jpg and was not located in the same folder as the MP3s. Is that correct? How did PerfectTunes determine that this album had no cover art?

PerfectTunes also showed fixes for albums with low resolution art. That list included all of the albums that did not show any album art in iTunes. Because those albums did not have embedded cover art but did show covers when using WMP, I assume they all had hidden folder.jpg files and that is what PerfectTunes found on its scan. So if I click to fix them and have the option to embed the art checked, then will PerfectTunes embed the art and also create a new higher resolution folder.jpg?

If those albums with low resolution folder.jpg files in fact had high resolution folder.jpg files, would PerfectTunes have considered them to not need any fix? If so, is there a way to have PerfectTunes show all the albums that don’t have embedded covers? It doesn’t do me as much good to have higher resolution folder.jpg files if iTunes doesn’t show them.

The single songs that had album art did show potential fixes but the ones without album information did not. That was as I expected.

[Spoon]

Re: PerfectTunes Album Art Basic Questions

Only the first file in an album is checked to see if it has embedded art, it will assume all the others in the album are the same.

Tracks with low resolution art would be upgraded as well as folder.jpg written (and any tracks without art would have art written).

The easiest option would be to search with Windows explorer for folder.jpg, there will be a big list of them, simply delete them if they are not required.

[GeeBee]

Re: PerfectTunes Album Art Basic Questions

Only the first file in an album is checked to see if it has embedded art, it will assume all the others in the album are the same.

Tracks with low resolution art would be upgraded as well as folder.jpg written (and any tracks without art would have art written).

The easiest option would be to search with Windows explorer for folder.jpg, there will be a big list of them, simply delete them if they are not required.

So it would be the luck of the draw whether the first song had album art or not. Sorted by track no, the first song had album art but sorted alphabetically, the first album did not. I can live with that as long as I know the rules.

If I make the hidden system folder.jpg visible and then delete them and then scanned with PerfectTunes, it would show those albums as needing album art, correct?

I appreciate your efforts and what appears to be a great product. Guess I will have to purchase it now and play with the full version. Thanks.

[Spoon]

Re: PerfectTunes Album Art Basic Questions

Correct, you would need to go on the configuration page and drop the database so everything is rescanned.

[riplove]

Re: PerfectTunes Album Art Basic Questions

My question is somewhat similar so am posting it here as this is the first post I looked at searching for an answer. I have a bunch of album art missing in iTunes so I set the iTunes music folder inside PerfectTunes and ran the test. It had found hundreds of albums missing cover art. I went into iTunes and some of the albums definitely had the artwork in them and when I "get info" on each track in the album it would show the album art work for each song. What does this mean exactly? Why is it finding albums missing artwork when iTunes shows artwork including for each individual track - does iTunes use a custom field for album art that is not the same as the mp3 standard? I am worried about having PerfectTunes overwriting album art for which it already exists as decided for by iTunes presumable from their store....

[mville]

Re: PerfectTunes Album Art Basic Questions

My question is somewhat similar so am posting it here as this is the first post I looked at searching for an answer. I have a bunch of album art missing in iTunes so I set the iTunes music folder inside PerfectTunes and ran the test. It had found hundreds of albums missing cover art. I went into iTunes and some of the albums definitely had the artwork in them and when I "get info" on each track in the album it would show the album art work for each song. What does this mean exactly? Why is it finding albums missing artwork when iTunes shows artwork including for each individual track - does iTunes use a custom field for album art that is not the same as the mp3 standard? I am worried about having PerfectTunes overwriting album art for which it already exists as decided for by iTunes presumable from their store....

PerfectTunes is looking for artwork embedded in the song files (or for artwork existing in the same album folder as the song files).

iTunes, in it's wisdom, stores artwork in it's library files and is therefore immediately unavailable to any other media library software.

So, PerfectTunes thinks those files are missing artwork and if you decide to move your audio library files to another player, they will be without artwork.

(Yet another reason not to use iTunes, for organising your library)

[garym]

Re: PerfectTunes Album Art Basic Questions

A few years ago I used "iCoverArt" program to automatically take the artwork from itunes library database and embed it in the mp3/aac files in itunes. This made the art available to any player (not just itunes). Worked really well and cost $5. There may be some free scripts floating around that do the same thing, but iCoverArt was simple click and run and did many thousand files in a single batch.

[riplove]

Re: PerfectTunes Album Art Basic Questions

Thanks both of you - I wish I didn't have to use iTunes, but I don't know how to reliably get my music onto my iPhone. I have tried 3rd party software and it tends to do weird things like place duplicate songs, I have had cover art get switched around to wrong albums and basically force me into a phone reset. iTunes is of course buggy as well, sometimes when synching a lot of music to my phone at the same time it will actually remove album art - drives me nuts. Maybe iCoverart still exists but I am going to try PerfectTunes now that I feel more comfortable - I use to like ITunes but I think starting at 11 its like MS Word for music now - a bloated disaster that makes changes for the sake of changes alone...

[mville]

Re: PerfectTunes Album Art Basic Questions

Thanks both of you - I wish I didn't have to use iTunes, but I don't know how to reliably get my music onto my iPhone. I have tried 3rd party software and it tends to do weird things like place duplicate songs, I have had cover art get switched around to wrong albums and basically force me into a phone reset. iTunes is of course buggy as well, sometimes when synching a lot of music to my phone at the same time it will actually remove album art - drives me nuts. Maybe iCoverart still exists but I am going to try PerfectTunes now that I feel more comfortable - I use to like ITunes but I think starting at 11 its like MS Word for music now - a bloated disaster that makes changes for the sake of changes alone...

I am not suggesting you don't use iTunes, just not for tagging/organising you audio library. In fact, I use iTunes to load my mp3 library onto my iPod Classic.

I build my flac audio library completely external to iTunes.

Then, using Batch Converter I create mp3 files from the flac library with all the artwork, tags and soundcheck information I need.

Finally, once I am happy, the mp3 folders are manually added in iTunes (I have disabled the organise file/library options in iTunes preferences)

[riplove]

Re: PerfectTunes Album Art Basic Questions

Thanks mville, what is Batch Converter - I don't see that exact name in the poweramp product - is that part of MP3 converter?

[mville]

Re: PerfectTunes Album Art Basic Questions

Thanks mville, what is Batch Converter - I don't see that exact name in the poweramp product - is that part of MP3 converter?

It is part of dBpoweramp Music Converter.