And here comes a new release of mussorgsky, with some features that should help you to have a even more beautiful Album view in your N900 media player:
- By default mussorgsky uses “artist + album” to search online for the album art. Now it is possible to choose manually the search string to find better results:
- Added the alternative to unset the album art, reverting it to the default icon
- The list of songs can be filtered, switching between “all songs” or “songs with incomplete metadata”
- Albums with special characters in their name (like ‘&’) are now handled correctly.
And few UI improvements here and there:
- The buttons in the main screen have now shadows with rounded corners when clicked
- The play, next, back buttons in the edit view come from the mediaplayer theme
- When a song has no metadata at all, it is listed using its filename
It is already available in extras-devel, hope you enjoy it. And finally, thanks to Eric, Aapo and Claudio for their very valuable comments and help!
Ivan Frade's Blog 
Is it possible add option to choose your own image file as album art?
Sorry for bad english.
thx !!!!
CAN’T wait for this to get upgraded to regular extras! I’ll be the first to download it! 😀
This works great allready, thx for making this awasome app!
Hi,
I love the app, it works really well. One open questions, it does not seem to work with AAC files and M4A files. Is this something that is not supported currently? I am happy to provide files if you need debugging help.
thanks for the great application!
John
@John M4A and OGG are in the roadmap. I am not sure if the library that mussorgsky uses (mutagen) supports AAC. If the library supports it, it can be added! Thanks for the comment.
Following up on a previous post:
Is/Will it be possible to use your own image files as Cover Art?
@Andy, @omkr Technically it is not difficult to add the option “choose from local file system”.
I don’t like much the idea though:
* In general is easier to find the album art online than in your local filesystem
* The basic user doesn’t have any clue where the album art is! (and that is completely fine)
* It is not easy to fit that functionality in the UI: Using a button in the download view? you use that button after having download some covers?
However, if there is enough demand of the functionality, it can be added. 🙂
I think that what is really needed may not be the ability to use a file, but perhaps a URL. Sometimes I cannot convince Mussorgsky to do a lookup which can get the art, but I can get it from a bit of Google searching.
Alternatively maybe just more control over searches (I have *no* idea where it is getting these pictures from).
@Shane: It is completely on purpose to hide the source of the images, to make the UI as simple as possible.
If you are curious, it is using bing.com . At the time i tried different search engines it was giving much better results than google images.
I never thought about the URL! that could be an interesting addition. Again, let see how can we fit it in the UI. Thanks for the idea!
I also wish for this option. Often times I have the JPG already but Media Player doesn’t use it for some reason, and Mussorgsky can’t find the artwork in the internet (i have a lot of uncommon albums, CDs not sold online etc.).
What about a compromise, Mussorgsky can scan for image files inside the same directory as music files, and present them as choices alongside the internet search results. That way the user doesn’t have to navigate the filesystem, but he can still make use of existing covers that Media Player may have ignored.
Or if someone knows of another way we can simply tell it “Use this cover for this album” if Ivan does not want to add this functionality. (It is his right to add or refuse any feature in his own software) 🙂
Hi Ivan, this application is something very promising! It works for me for downloading the album arts quite well! Thanks!
I have installed version 0.4 and have several comments after a day of using it:
1. It would be nice when selecting the picture for the album be able to view the image larger – sometimes you cannot recognize from the small icon if the picture matches the album or not.
2. When I tried to tweak the metadata for any song, the application crashes when it tries to write the modified metadata to the song. The file format I tried to write to was mp3 and I have tried various songs/albums and have never accomplished saving the metadata. It crashes before or whole the data is written to the file because the newly added information doesn’t persist. I have Maemo 5 / N900 with latest firmware and updates. Should I file some bug report?
3. I have noticed that some characters like “ščřžý” in the metadata are displayed incorrectly so there might be either problem with encoding or displaying .. are different character sets supported? I can help with some testing data etc.
Thank you for the cool application, definitely one of the most useful for me! 🙂
@flyskyhigh thanks for your feedback:
1. There is no problem code-wise to use bigger images, but the space of the screen is pretty limited.
2. I saw that problem some time ago (only when changing the album), but i couldn’t reproduce it and nobody else complained about it. Now we have a component in bugzilla, so you are more than welcome to open the first bug there!
note: start mussorgsky in a terminal and make it fail writing metadata… you should see some error messages that can help to find the problem
3. Mussorgsky takes the data from tracker and it assumes utf8. It can be a good bug for tracker.
A known problem in Mussorgsky is that it doesn’t save the album art in the right location when the album name contain those special characters (I have that problem with ö and ä). This means that Media Player doesn’t show the album art (even when it is fine in mussorgsky). i have a couple of ideas to fix it, so hopefully will be fixed in the next release
Such an awesome app. Thank you!
Hi Ivan,
it would be nice, if its possible to choose my own image from any folder on the device
cheers
Just wanted to add kudos for this tool, since without it I’d be missing my cover artwork.
For some reason, 99% of the time this tool does NOT download images properly through the Privoxy web proxy. While I haven’t diagnosed the root cause, I discovered adding bing.com and .bing.com to the proxy’s “fragile” list fixes image downloads.
I didn’t test whether the tool reads Maemo/Gnome’s proxy values — my setup hardcodes http_proxy (and https_proxy) as envvars in /etc/profile, which is not ideal when outside a private proxy’s network! But it works.
I am having trouble changing metadata that is all ready existing it doesnt seem to change anything i alter any suggestions
hi, I like the app a lot and i am sure it will be of demand
However at this very moment i have a problem save results of edit of tags
Dump of test run in X-term is below. This may be some GTK incompatibility or Py libs version problem. I have the latest firmware and updates but i do not update libs etc fron extras-dev.
thank yo for your help and hope for quick and simple resolution – plese advise
~ $ mussorgsky
Tracker backend up
OK
Æèâü¸ì â Ðîññèè -> /home/user/.thumbnails/cropped/974e169cbfdc892423d98429b9abf41a.jpeg
ЖивЬем в России. Юбилейный концерт. -> /home/user/.thumbnails/cropped/d2d36ef8dc6cfbfe2a96b6552e08c0ce.jpeg
/usr/lib/mussorgsky/edit_panel_tm.py:52: GtkWarning: gtk_tree_model_filter_get_value: assertion `GTK_TREE_MODEL_FILTER (model)->priv->stamp == iter->stamp’ failed
return self.model.get (self.current, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Segmentation fault
~ $
Hi pink, the problem was already reported here:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8912
I have just committed a fix in the repository. It will be available in the next 0.5 release (don’t ask me when will it happen though, i hope that soonish)
Great software!
A couple of questions:
1. where does it save the images of the downloaded album art?
2. if i uninstall the program, would the album art still be there?
Thanks!
@xymez
1. The album art is under ~/.cache/media-art and the thumbnail of it, under ~/.thumbnails/cropped/
2. Yes, uninstalling mussorgsky doesn’t delete the downloaded album art.
hi!
i have a follow-up newbie question:
is there any way for me to access those directories?
i need to remove an album art that keeps showing up as thumbnails for aac and wav files.
it was an album art for an mp3 file that i have long deleted, but the art is still showing up.
any assistance would be greatly appreciated. 😉
Is it possible to set the album art for an album name that is shared across multiple artists. i.e. “the best of” may apply to a dozen or so different albums from different artists. I see no way to do this. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. By the way, great app otherwise. Greatly helped me clean up after tracker seemed completely incapable of reindexing my manually downloaded album art.
@Tim: It is not possible to assign different album arts to albums with same name and different artist, because the album art is stored based only in the album name. Using the combination “artist-albumname” to save the album art would solve this problem but also multiplies the copies of album-art for compilation albums. Not much we can do now about it. It is a limitation in the system.
This is an amazing app !! Well done Ivan. it has solved any problems for me with Album art.
thank you !
There is clearly a whole lot to know about this. I think you made some very good factors in Characteristics also.
Keep working , excellent career!
hi there 😉 i downloaded your app but it can’t find any covers…i tried a few bands like muse and so on..did i anything wrong?
matthias
There was a problem parsing the HTML of the search results. Thanks to Nikolai from talk.maemo.org, the problem is fixed. A new version is available in extras-devel.