Browser folder art.
KJinx101
Member
This is already kind of present on mobile, but I think it would be really nice if the folders in the browser displayed art from whatever files are in any subfolder. Right now, if an album is inside of a folder or something, its art is displayed, but folders above that level don't display the art. It's not the biggest matter, but can be convenient when navigating. I also think it would be nice to have the art displayed in the browser on the web as well.
Separated thread from https://community.asti.ga/discussion/414/some-requests-to-add-to-the-user-experience#latest
Comments
Right now, if an album is inside of a folder or something, its art is displayed
To clarify, you mean: if you click into the folder, you can see the art?
I mean, on mobile, let's say you're in the browser and you have an album's mp3 files within a folder.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1teEXHTSJEjnr7fOQnk1r4SlanOIOK12p/view?usp=sharing
Often it'd look something like this once you're past the browser's main folder. But if you categorize your folder a little more you may end up with folders that look like this
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oukPAM4gnMg75fOvaj2IEulCqdUSu0bC/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gobYBwYKCRj0uxTOS38qo66DiJWHaj3x/view?usp=sharing
And as can be seen, the parent folder of the Christmas albums labeled 'Christmas' and the adjacent 'Halloween' don't have any art even though there are folders inside of them that display are. It's not much of a big deal there of course but...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZMMaGYua3vy15cvhvQ9O3Fs_fkBUr9oH/view?usp=sharing
But I also have some music, albums, and folders which are in languages I actually don't understand where seeing art on the folders would actually be tremendously useful.
Also, I think this way of viewing folders and their art would be nice to have on the web too. But yeah. Like a slide show for a folder that contains multiple different albums, or for those multi-part albums that I keep inside of a single parent folder, would be great; having that art there makes navigating a liittle bit more convenient especially when scrolling fast through my music. I hope that's good clarification on what I mean. Thanks!
Oh, ok. So this is in folder browsing in the app.
It's for when you have multiple levels in the folder hierarchy. You want something similar to on Windows where you get multiple images superimposed on the folder, e.g. all three images for Christmas arranged on a grid.
But for any folder with enough albums, how do we decide which album artwork is shown? We can only choose a finite number, otherwise everything would be shrunk.
Not necessarily like the windows folders, but like... hmm.. I'm not actually sure what does it (I think the old google play did it with playlists actually before it shut down), but I think it would use the art from my most recently played songs from it and switch the playlist art kind of like a slideshow screensaver or something. For now I like how Astiga displays folders similarly to albums on mobile.
Ok, thanks.
I think I can add a bit to this I think.
I noticed folders with music only check the first time opened with files inside for pictures. So when I update the cover image to something else, the folder image never gets updated. Worse, if I open a folder before it's synchronized it's forever stuck on having no image. This part seems perhaps more like a bug than a feature request, as I doubt that's intentionally (at least, not the result of it).
As for folders that don't contain their own music files, it is semi-related to this: https://community.asti.ga/discussion/comment/1246#Comment_1246
At least for me, those folders are genres and artists. As my folder structure is genres (where the "main" genre of an artist is used to categorize rather than the track genre(s)) > artists > albums (sorted on release date by naming them [release year] - [album title]) > tracks . Although no doubt the exact hierarchy is different for each user, I'm guessing it's still mainly artists, genres, etc one way or another.
On phone I use folder browser too as I like to search by this most of the time, as just searching artist etc end up with a bit much results (or just because I don't know what to listen to yet beside having a certain vibe in my head) and I can't select artists per genre. Folder browsing works perfect for me on phone in terms of fining stuff. It also gives me albums ordered by date which, as I might have dropped before and is still a big pet peeve of mine on desktop, is far preferred over alphabetical order to me.
I've been thinking about making a tiny empty music file with an image to set them. But while the bug I mentioned in the second paragraph would let those stay after I remove the file again, the bug also prevents it from working in folders where I have had any kind of audio file before, which are many🙃
Yeah, we might not be expiring a cache somewhere...
So it resets when you remove all app storage (not if you clear only cache). That's fine, but now I was trying to do this and after this add an mp3 file with an image to the artist folder to make it save some image there. However, somehow it fails to set this image (and yes, it's synchronised well), while album arts are updated as expected. Any idea why and how to fix it?
So it's like, my folder structure is Astiga/[genre]/[artist]/[album]
When I add an mp3 file with the image of the artist in /Astiga/[genre]/[artist] that folder doesn't get the image
But the images of the audio files in Astiga/[genre]/[artist]/[album] do set the image of that folder
Is it because the artist folder also has folders in it? I can't think of anything else, but why would it look for more than audio files?
There is provision for showing artwork for a folder in the code. And I can see your library is synchronised.
Given:
I noticed folders with music only check the first time opened with files inside for pictures. So when I update the cover image to something else, the folder image never gets updated. Worse, if I open a folder before it's synchronized it's forever stuck on having no image.
Isn't this why the image isn't shown - if you've looked at the artist folder before?
Do you see the image in the middle pane when you go up one level?
Isn't this why the image isn't shown - if you've looked at the artist folder before?
Removing all app storage "fixes" this "issue". Since all data is gone (including login, settings, and well, any data the app has stored even outside cache), it will check again for images. I deleted all app data after synchronization to be sure the file is synchronized before opening the folder.
Hence, the only thing I can think of is that it checks not only audio files but also sees the folder, checks the folder for images over the audio files, and folders don't have an image in their meta-data, so they get stuck on no image. But then, as usual, that's based on "symptoms" I find as a user. The actual code may work completely different.
Do you see the image in the middle pane when you go up one level?
The left plane is one level up, and the red-bordered box is the folder. So sadly, no, I don't.
Can you try again now? I've added some code to log a few things and also try manipulating the paths a bit. Let me know what you see, if any different. You may need to reset the cache again though.
It still ain't working sadly. It's the same as before.
I tried the Koda Kumi folder, the Chanmina folder. For testing purposes, the img.mp3 in the Chanmina folder is very short (0:00:128) and only has a title and picture in the metadata. The Koda Kumi one has all fields filled that I fill in "normal" audio files and is 3 times as long. But neither work sadly.
I checked your library and the small MP3s are correctly indexed - their artwork is stored.
🙄 I realised there's a mistake in my change though.
Can you try again?
I also added some more logging for some other cases.
That did it! Doesn't it look much better this way 😊!?
Are files still stored endlessly, or will they update every once in a while now?
Either way, I got something to do now. Time to add these small files to every artist folder I have 😏.
P.S. I personally wouldn't close the feature request as I feel using a tiny empty MP3 file is more a workaround than a real added feature. But it works for now.
Ok, that proves my theory about the query, good. Agree this is an open feature request - having a container music file is a horrible workaround :-D
Erm - not sure about the caching. The artwork is ingested at sync time so if you make changes you will at least have to sync. I haven't done anything to the app.
This change has been rolled out to all users now, btw. The mini-MP3 file hack is still required, so I'll leave this open.