undesired? bug? album art icon behavior

[MrSinatra]

so if you have files that share an album name, (and even the same folder/dir), but they have differing artists per track, you will get a separate album art icon for each unique artist, even if you have unchecked the "use artist as album artist" pref.

the fix is to either assign them all the same album artist tag, or the same artist tag.

it seems to me that differing unique artists on the same titled album should not result in differing icon placeholders (of the same art btw) esp if the tracks are all in the same directory.

I know this might be blasphemy, since winamp generally ignores directory, but it doesn't ignore it for art, so maybe in this case what I am saying makes sense?

[Aminifu]

Interesting.

If (for instance) you have a compilation album with 10 artists, you see 10 copies of the same folder art when you select the album? That is a waste of system RAM. Is this something new?

Since I embed artwork, I see a separate image for each file anyway. They are seldom the same because I generally use a different image in each file, even for songs from the same album.

[Aminifu]

Hi MrSinatra,

On second look, I don't see a separate image for each file when using the default ML audio view. I see a separate image for each unique album and an image for songs without a populated album tag. It also seems that different capitalization of the words within an album name is ignored when determining unique album names.

I generally don't populate the album artist tag or it contains the same string as the artist tag when I do. I also have enabled the option to "Use Artist as Album Artist if not available".

For example, when I select an artist in the top left panel of which I have several songs (each embedded with artwork) listed in the bottom panel. All the songs, but 2 (with empty album tags) came from 3 different albums, so I see 4 album art images in the top right panel.

Even if I have different images embedded in songs from the same album, Winamp only picks 1 image for each unique album and 1 image for all songs in the list without an album tag. The images used seem to depend on the sort order of the songs in the bottom pane. The embedded image from the 1st song in the list (top to bottom) from each unique album or having a non-populated album tag is used.

I really have not paid this much attention. The skin I use does not show the ML unless I select it. I mostly use playlists and only see 1 image at a time (for the song currently playing or selected). I normally only turn to the ML views when searching for songs (or selecting songs from a custom smart view) to make a new playlist. Lately I've been lazy and using "MusicIP Mixer" or the built-in Gracenote supported feature to generate playlists from 'seed' songs.

Since Winamp keeps all images displayed per session in active memory, it probably should try to display the minimum number necessary in the ML views.