Hi,

In my MP3 collection I have the cover images of the albums embedded in the song's ID3 tags (so they can show in my cell phone) and also in the file ".folder.png" in the album's folder, which is FreeDesktop.org's convention, so Dolphin shows the cover image instead of the folder icon.

My question is: doesn't Amarok support any of those methods? I'm using the latest version (2.2.2) and I couldn't make it recognize it.

I could manually for each album set a custom cover and point to the ".folder.png" file, but I was hoping Amarok could do that automatically for me... Maybe a script?

Anyways, if the answer is "no, Amarok doesn't support that", I suggest as a new feature for you guys to implement.

Thank you,

Vítor Souza

1) Embedded: Not yet.
2) In folder: Yes.

[quote="markey"]1) Embedded: Not yet.
2) In folder: Yes.[/quote]

For #2 (In folder), how to do it? .folder.png is not recognized...

There's no "Help contents" in Amarok, on the website I couldn't find a link to documentation, I tried googling about cover images, but couldn't find an answer to this. If you could please enlighten me...

Thanks again,

Vítor Souza

Well, name it "cover.jpg" or "cover.png", both are supported. Of course "folder.png" is not very meaningful in this context, don't you think?

Mamarok wrote:Well, name it "cover.jpg" or "cover.png", both are supported. Of course "folder.png" is not very meaningful in this context, don't you think?

I see. Thanks for the response.

As for .folder.png, it's not my choice. I used a software called albumart-qt that says it's using FreeDesktop.org's standards. Being a standard should mean something... Dolphin recognizes it, I'd suggest Amarok do it too, but it's up to you.

Thanks again,
Vítor Souza

Well, albumart-qt seems not to be developed anymore (last update June 2005!), and it was a KDE 3 application...so much for the standard.

I can add "folder.png" support to Amarok, it should be trivial to support both. Let me try...

Done:


commit 4e6ec8fa396e4fcebd35890ddb04336b6ae50b8c
Author: Mark Kretschmann <kretschmann@kde.org>
Date: Fri Jan 22 10:20:36 2010 +0100

Scanner now also looks for "folder.*" as cover image.

Apparently some applications use this convention.

That's great! I'll check out in my next update, then. But make sure you include the "." before the file name... albumart-qt saves it as ".folder.png", so it's usually hidden and doesn't get in the way.

Thanks a lot!

Vítor Souza

Ok, I just wanted to add a note here and correct myself...

I was looking some more into what albumart-qt [1] does and I noticed it creates not only ".folder.png" but also ".directory", which is a text file that refers to ".folder.png":

[Desktop Entry]
Icon=./.folder.png

So it seems like the name ".folder.png" is arbitrary and was chosen by albumart-qt. So I don't know if you guys want to commit Amarok to some arbitrary choice by some other application...

I'm sorry I suggested it, I thought it was a standard, but seems like the standard is the ".directory" file, not the image. [2]

If still you want to add support to it, however, you said that you've already changed the code to add "folder.*"... Any chance you added a "." before to look also for hidden files? Maybe ".cover.*" would also be interesting for those who don't want to be reminded that the cover image is there at the folder.

I did come up with a workaround, though: I wrote a Java program that writes into the MySQL amarok database (which I configured to be external) and sets the covers. If anyone is interested, I can share it. I wish I had the time to write this into an Amarok script, but right now it's impossible.

Thanks again and sorry for my mistake,

Vítor Souza

[1] http://www.unrealvoodoo.org/hiteck/projects/albumart/
[2] http://standards.freedesktop.org/deskto ... atest.html

I'm no fan of these file names. It's hard to backup the covers, just in case.
I prefer my own naming scheme artist-album in lowercase and wrote a small script and a context menu entry for dolphin to set a selected image as folder icon.

Regards
Dieter

Don't know how relevant it is for your needs, but I came across this post because the Sansa Fuze MP3 player also uses folder.jpg as the album art for songs in the same directory. I was actually here looking for a way to make amarok create and/or transfer them to my fuze... anyway, I don't think the name is completely arbitrary as I have come across it several times in the past.

Erm. I have actually added that feature to Amarok (git master), will surface in 2.2.3:


commit 4e6ec8fa396e4fcebd35890ddb04336b6ae50b8c
Author: Mark Kretschmann <kretschmann@kde.org>
Date: Fri Jan 22 10:20:36 2010 +0100

Scanner now also looks for "folder.*" as cover image.

Apparently some applications use this convention.

When you say you added the feature... I saw that you added support for having Amarok use folder.jpg as the album art. Did you also add the ability to make it store the album art that it pulls as folder.jpg as well?

I have seen that some people have made scripts to do such things (look up the source file in the amarok db and copy it out to the folder and such), but even then, I don't believe that Amarok will move it to the player for me. Not a big issue really, it would just be kind of nice.

keyBangingMonkey wrote:When you say you added the feature... I saw that you added support for having Amarok use folder.jpg as the album art. Did you also add the ability to make it store the album art that it pulls as folder.jpg as well?

I have seen that some people have made scripts to do such things (look up the source file in the amarok db and copy it out to the folder and such), but even then, I don't believe that Amarok will move it to the player for me. Not a big issue really, it would just be kind of nice.

Hmm. Well, such things are really what the script system was made for.

I mean, if 0.5% of our users need an obscure hack for making something work, then adding that to our Amarok code base would just bloat things. Every feature you add has to be maintained, after all.