Cover art woes in music files

[Steve Freeman]

Hi, I've just installed the latest Jellyfin server on my Win 10 PC....

I'm currently testing it against various clients: VLC (PC and Android), Foobar2000 (PC and Android) and Cambridge Audio 75 (an excellent music streamer).   I currently use Universal Media Server on the PC (which works brilliantly and is super-simple - fine with all my audio clients, plus all my TVs), but I am shortly about to buy a new NAS RAID (Terramaster F4-423) and I noticed that Jellyfin will likely run on that, but UMS does not (AFAIK). So, I started familiarizing myself with the Win version of Jellyfin....

It took me a while to realize you had to find a checkbox to turn on the DLNA server (why not on by default?) so that my clients could actually find the server. OK first hurdle sorted.

For simplicity and speed I have just copied a single folder of music from my huge collection onto the Desktop, and have made that folder the only one that Jellyfin scans.

The folder contains 9 MP3 files and a single Folder.jpg file. The latter is a JPG at 1400x1400 pixels. Each MP3 file has been carefully manicured by MP3Tag to ensure every tag is how I want it, and each file includes embedded cover art at 220x220 pixels to save a bit of space (worthwhile with 60K music files). The files all play and display perfectly when running any local media player (accessing as files). The files all play and display perfectly, on VLC, FB2K and Evo streamer when accessed over DLNA with my PC running the UMS server. This is the same when I use my old NAS, which needs to be replaced, but which runs a Twonky media server.

My problem is that cover art for music files seems to behave oddly when using Jellyfin on ALL 3 of my clients..........

I saw that all the images of cover art in my clients were very blurred, but only when using Jellyfin! Actually, I tried Emby last year and it had the same problem, so I ditched it in favour of UMS - but since there are common roots between Emby and Jellyfin, this may be a clue....  I also tried Serviio, and that displayed artwork to my clients correctly, like UMS does.

I have tried many combinations of JF settings, and tried removing Folder.jpg from the test folder of MP3s. I tried renaming it cover.jpg, I tried a resized Folder.jpg file. I tried disabling all internet access to tag/metadata/artwork, as I want my own correct artwork! I've now lost track of everything i've fiddled with and will probably have to erase JF completely and reinstall from scratch (why not have a "restore to factory settings" button?).

I am at a loss to find the magic sauce to get this to work properly.....  Has anyone encountered this and can anyone help? 

See pics: Jellyfin with 1 setting changed from clean installation (i.e. DLNA: on), one pic is UMS, one pic is Jellyfin, same source files.

I just want to play music files on my clients and see clean artwork!

               

[Steve Freeman]

FWIW, I have copied the music folder, renamed it, removed embedded art from each file, removed folder.jpg/cover.jpg and added the folder to JF.

With this, all images are blank in every one of my clients (I expect this).

Adding a 1400x1400 jpg file to that folder, called "cover.jpg", restored the blurry images shown in one of the pics above. N.B. it is the same if the art file is called "folder.jpg".

To me, this looks like embedded art is not being scanned or not processed correctly, but a parallel file in the folder is scanned and used instead.

OK, I don't necessarily need embedded art in my music for Jellyfin (or Emby) but it exists for other scenarios in my case, but what I'm not following is why JF isn't able to make a non-blurry picture for whatever purpose or size, from a perfectly fine 1400x1400 source image. Any ideas?

[He-who-is-tired]

Maybe a thing you could check would be to find one of the problematic songs, in an album list, click the 3 vertical dots on the right hand side, and select 'edit images'. It seems to bring up a dialog that shows the item's resolution, so you might be able to figure out which copy of an image file is being used. It might allow you to choose between the embedded image and the one being used for the album.

[TheDreadPirate]

FWIW, I have copied the music folder, renamed it, removed embedded art from each file, removed folder.jpg/cover.jpg and added the folder to JF.

With this, all images are blank in every one of my clients (I expect this).

Adding a 1400x1400 jpg file to that folder, called "cover.jpg", restored the blurry images shown in one of the pics above. N.B. it is the same if the art file is called "folder.jpg".

To me, this looks like embedded art is not being scanned or not processed correctly, but a parallel file in the folder is scanned and used instead.

OK, I don't necessarily need embedded art in my music for Jellyfin (or Emby) but it exists for other scenarios in my case, but what I'm not following is why JF isn't able to make a non-blurry picture for whatever purpose or size, from a perfectly fine 1400x1400 source image.  Any ideas?

Definitely don't remove embedded images.  For music Jellyfin likes embedded images and, in my experience, works better with them vs having an image in the folder.

You can use an app like Musicbrainz Picard to auto-magically tag and embedded images in a way that Jellyfin tends to like.  Because of the nature of music and how many different ways it can be organized you will still need to tweak things to get them how you like.  But Picard will do the majority of the work.

[Steve Freeman]

 

Maybe a thing you could check would be to find one of the problematic songs, in an album list, click the 3 vertical dots on the right hand side, and select 'edit images'.  It seems to bring up a dialog that shows the item's resolution, so you might be able to figure out which copy of an image file is being used.  It might allow you to choose between the embedded image and the one being used for the album.

I'm reasonably sure which artwork is being used when viewing tracks, at least viewing them from within the browser interface to Jellyfin. It's the 1400x1440 folder.jpg file...  I think I know this because I've got one test folder that Jellyfin can see, with two sub folders in it. One has a 1400x1400 folder.jpg file, and 9 mp3 tracks each with embedded cover art (at 220x220). The other folder is the same, except I have stripped the embedded cover art out of each of the 9 music files. When I view the music tracks on my media player's android app (Cambridge Audio StreamMagic), it's the folder-level files that are blurry - they are neither 1400x1400 nor 220x200, but look like very tiny files scaled up. When I select either of the folders containing the music files, I see a nice big, unblurred picture of the cover art.
In the browser interface to jellyfin, I can find any means to choose between artwork sizes - if you have any ideas about doing this it would be handy. Searching in the jellyfin folders for *.jpg, I can see a load of files with sizes 1400x1400, 480x480 and 48x48, the latter two presumably generated from my original "folder.jpg" files, so I suspect my blurred images (see screenshots in the original post) are the 48x48 ones that have been expanded by the StreamMagic app.  

The thing is that the images that Jellyfin stores on the PC, have unique identifiers and are stored in bunch of folders: "C:\ProgramData\Jellyfin\Server\cache\images\resized-images\", so it's tricky to work out what is used by a DLNA client (see pic) - I could break all sorts of things if I mess about with the cached files!

It may be a peculiarity of my client app - StreamMagic - which is the setup and control tool for streaming to my Evo media player, but at the same time, the exact same music folders display perfectly on the client app if I use Universal Media Server on the PC as a DLNA server, or Twonky on my NAS unit.  I'm wondering if some kind of client-confog is needed for my media player (is there any info on making such things?)

But thanks for your interest. I think Jellyfin can be made to work in my usage case, if I can tap into the key knowledge about image file usage somehow!


   

[Steve Freeman]

Definitely don't remove embedded images.  For music Jellyfin likes embedded images and, in my experience, works better with them vs having an image in the folder.
You can use an app like Musicbrainz Picard to auto-magically tag and embedded images in a way that Jellyfin tends to like.  Because of the nature of music and how many different ways it can be organized you will still need to tweak things to get them how you like.  But Picard will do the majority of the work.

I wasn't going to remove embedded artwork (it's 60k files - and although it can be done with a single click, the overall copy-for-backup time is horrendous), but I'm happy tinker with a few test folders!

As you can see from my other posts today, I have shown that in my usage case, the embedded artwork is apparently not used by Jellyfin, at least it is not used to make the resized images that are blurry in the screenshots from my media app.  I have other media players that rely on embedded artwork.

I'm not sure what you mean by embedding images "in a way that Jellyfin tends to like" - can you explain?  The embedded artwork is 100% *.jpg (scanned by a "trid.exe" script that checks picture content against file extension and corrects, say .bmp to .jpg automatically). The size is 220x220. The tag is "Front Cover" and is a standard ID3V2.3 tag type used by MP3tag - the embedded art in my files appears to work everywhere else.

As it happens, I use MP3tag with AlbumArtDownloader set up in it as an automated tool, because it offers artwork choices from multiple sources, so I can get the exact cover art that matches my CDs (for example the US or UK cover of Electric Ladyland, if you are familiar, or special expanded albums with slightly different covers, or remasters etc). I'm pretty familiar with tagging!

As I said in the other post, there may a weird interaction between my media player and the artwork it pulls off the server, or a Jellyfin setting I've failed to notice. I'm pretty sure the the blurred images I'm seeing are the 48x48 thumbnail sized ones I can see in the cache of Jellyfin, but I'm stuck to know how to fix it. Maybe I need a config file specially for my Evo media player? Who knows....

Thanks for your interest though - maybe a developer will see this and say "Aha - I see what he's wrong here"