Bookshelf Apps

Album Art

December 16th, 2008 1

I get a lot of questions about Album Art support in SongBook. Mostly the Album Art is dependent on your MediaServer, and unfortunately Twonky MediaServer is a bit difficult to set up with Album Art. Here are some hints to help get your Album Art working correctly with Twonky.

In each Album folder you should have one image file for your Album Art, this file should be called Folder.jpg (or folder.jpg). I think PNG will work as well, but I don’t have any PNG album art at the moment. I have had problems when you have other image files in the folder, so it is best to remove any other image files.

Twonky has a bug that causes it to fail to send Album Art if there is a space in the path to the image file. I have verified this on Mac OS X but not on other platforms, but assume it is the same. The way around this is to turn off image scaling. This is also useful for getting better quality images to SongBook. You can turn off image scaling in the Twonky web admin interface.

For SongBook you are best having an image size of 320×320 or greater. This is the size of the large image in the Play tab. SongBook downloads the image and then scales it, so if you have a very large image file (many megabytes) this may cause SongBook to run out of memory and quit, so don’t go too large. I suggest that if you are importing your images fresh you import at 600×600 just to remain future-proof. You don’t want to have to go though this process again later.

SongBook does seem to get quite a few network errors when requesting Album Art, it does retry three times but still sometimes the art file does not load. This is what is happening if you normally see an art file but occasionally do not. If all you art files disappear at once this is SongBook reducing it’s memory usage. When memory gets low SongBook removes anything that is not essential, and Album Art falls in to this category. You should not see this happen very often at all but it could happen.

Other media servers may have more reliable and usable album art in the near future, this should improve the situation. I am also working on other features in SongBook to improve album art.

One Response

Erik
January 7th, 2009

I have a somewhat difficult problem. I dont know whether this is the forum to ask it but here goes: I seem to get the album art to work when im transferring mp3 files/album (regardless of quality), although the main part (95%) of my music is in FLAC. Album art does not work with FLAC for me. Why do you think that is?

Leave a Comment

You should not post support requests here as comments. The quickest way to get your support issue resolved is to email support@bookshelfapps.com, you will get a response and your issue will be tracked if you do this. A comment here may or may not get noticed. For more information on support see the support section

Your Comment
Use OpenID
OpenID URL