Mar 17 2009

Workarounds for Banshee album cover art

Published by Dougal at 9:59 pm under Bugs, Computing, Music

As nice a program as Banshee is, they did something really strange during development. At some point they broke everything — presumably for a rewrite — and are slowly assembling it again.

So things that were working well in the early days, like album covers, have become more of a pain with the slicker later versions. If you’re having trouble with album covers here are a few things that might help you.

  • Dropping a folder.jpg file in the album folder does work, but with a number of caveats.

  • Album covers are cached in ~/.cache/album-art/. And various subfolders too, for different sizes. It’s best to delete the relevant file from this cache before doing anything. Luckily the correspondence between filename and album is very simple:

    $ cd ~/.cache/album-art
$ rm robertplantalisonkrauss-raisingsand.jpg
$ rm */robertplantalisonkrauss-raisingsand.jpg

    It should be fairly easy to find the cached images with this naming scheme. Once the cache has been deleted Banshee will pick up the folder.jpg file you added manually to the album folder.

  • Album names that includes funny characters (parentheses and colons, for example) don’t parse properly. So inserting folder.jpg in the right place will have no effect.

    Instead you need to copy the album cover to the cache, ignoring the dodgy characters.

    $ cd .cache/album-art
$ cp ~/Music/Classic\ FM/Movies\:\ The\ Ultimate\ Collection/folder.jpg classicfm-moviestheultimatecollection.jpg

    Then it’ll just magically appear in Banshee, in the right place, and all the other resized versions will be generated without problem.

I hope this helps some people out for the more complicated scenarios. Eventually this bug will be fixed and Banshee will not have these problems at all. (Also, interested parties might want to check out that bug thread to see how far down a rat hole one can get with the “simple” topic of album art.)

5 responses so far

5 Responses to “Workarounds for Banshee album cover art”

  1. # Alessandroon 23 Jun 2009 at 8:26 pm

    You are a genius! Thanks very much! I really needed this information! Thanks thanks thanks!

    Oh, by the way: it seems enough to add the cover art to the main cache directory; banshee will do the rest of the magic, producing the small thumbnails as needed.

    Did I say thanks? Thanks! ;-)

  2. # antmarching.net » Banshee – fixing cover arton 23 Jun 2009 at 9:14 pm

    […] Traduco dal post originale disponibile qui: […]

  3. # Dougalon 23 Jun 2009 at 9:28 pm

    Thank you for your kinds words Alessandro. I also enjoyed your translation of my post, though I didn’t understand much of it! Google Translate gave me the broad idea though. :-)

  4. # Horacioon 11 Mar 2010 at 4:51 pm

    Thanks so much! I really think Banshee is a great program. Cover might be simple but are really important for my music, love organization.

    Wanted to share my workaround (which is 80% similar to what is posted here), this is what happened to me:

    While importing music I noticed the Album Art was either with low quality or wrong.

    I then used EasyTAG (http://easytag.sourceforge.net/) to add Album Art to my songs, but I noticed Banshee was still displaying the bad cover even I already had my embedded Art.

    Next step was to get to your “.cache/album-art” folder. There are a few extra folders with numbers showing different sizes of your cover. You need to look in every folder and delete any Album Art entry is bugging you.

    Next time you play your album it will try show the Album Art you have embedded =)

    Hope it works for you

  5. # Travison 15 Mar 2010 at 9:16 pm

    It works well. I just deleted everything out of the cache directory and then added the files to the album art folders of the albums. I had a little trouble until I realized that it doesn’t cache the files until you play a song from the album.