Album Art for Albums with the same title

[jph6t]

Originally posted by DJ Egg

Winamp 5.5 Released

* New: Album Art support
* New: [ml_local] Album Art support/pane and retrieval service

Notes:

-Re: Album Art support
-Lookup order: embedded (in tags),
%album%/cover/folder.jpg/gif/png, *.nfo file.
-Note: The cache is the art*.* files in the "Plugins\ml" folder
-(art.dat, art.idx, art60.dat/idx, art90.dat/idx, art120.dat/idx).
-Downloader access via:
Art icon rt-click menu, unified file info & pmp edit info box
-Currently saves as %album%.jpg in the containing folder.
-Art retrieval criteria and saving isn't configurable... yet!
-ie. you can't get it to look in a specific dir or save as anything other than %album%.jpg

Common Requests:

Commonly requested features taken from all of the 5.36/5.5 beta threads.

• Anything else already covered in the above notes,
  eg. AlbumArt (in)completion

I'd like to point out a design issue with the current approach for naming Album Art.

The use of %album% is insufficient, as Album title is NOT unique.
What happens when two different Albums have the same title?
"Greatest Hits" is the most common example.

This won't be an issue for those who organize their physical music files into separate folders by album, but the above will be a big issue for those that keep all of their MP3s
in one folder. I would also point out, that this later group is the group most likely to use the %album% method for populating Album Art, as they are NOT able to use the cover* or folder* methods for associating an image with an album (and it has already been discussed in this thread why some prefer not to embed Album Art images in the ID3 tags)

To be clear, currently the Media Library (ML) DOES in fact recognize two Albums
with the same title as two different items within the ML ... so no issues there.
The problem is with associating the two different Album Art images with the two
separate items within the ML.

My suggestion is to add the Album Artist's name to the naming scheme used by
"Get Album Art" (separated by a hyphen). Example:

• 2Pac - Greatest Hits.jpg
• Aerosmith - Greatest Hits.jpg
• Kenny Chesney - Greatest Hits.jpg

As such, the lookup order would have to be modified to look for:
embedded (in tags), %album artist% - %album%, cover.*, folder*.

This naming scheme has the added bonus of complimenting the naming scheme many likely use for their physical music files (Artist - Song Title). And very often the value for Artist will be equal to that for Album Artist. As such, the image files for an Album Artist's Album Art will appear next to that Artist's MP3 files when exploring the folder where these files are contained. Or if in the future the capability is added to Winamp to designate an Album Art folder separate from the folder containing the MP3 files ... having the Album Artist name in the Album Art's filename would still be nice as it will assist the user in remembering the Artist who recorded the Album, and puts all the Album Artist's Album Art side by side.

NOTE:

The above item was reported/discussed in the 5.5 BETA thread. As such, the issue is likely a well known quantity as far as the DEVs go. I am creating this post more to track the bug/feature request, and to assist new 5.5 users who are trying to figure out why some Album Art is NOT being displayed correctly within Winamp.