Twonky Forum

I purchased Twonky Media server and have version 4.4.5

I cannot get album cover art to appear checked the forums and no luck on exactly how.

Do I need to have the content type set to "All Content Type"?

Right now I have it set to Music only.

In each album folder I have coverart named "folder.jpg" or "folder.jpeg"

Well that's good. 61 views and no replies not even from the program moderators.

Sad that you pay for a product and absolutely NO-One has any idea on how to make it work not even the program creators apparently. Truly sad.

Sad does not begin to cover the feelings most of us have on wonky support...

Albumart is created by having a about 300*300 pixel jpg or png file in that directory called Folder.jpg, note the capitalized F.
You should be able to see that art in the twonky browser.
Having said that, it is a fact that coverart is then send via a url to the Upnpcontrolpoint. This URL is sometimes right, sometimes wrong. Getting the art displayed is a hit and miss proposition due to a wonky bug that together with the composer and albumartist tag, has been there for ages, which Twonky has known about for ages but just doesn't fix, go figure...

Does that help?

I have no problem with displaying coverart... but then I embed mine as a tag

If it helps, I use http://www.muvenum.com which I've found is excellent... but if you think this support is bad

MuvEnUm finds the artwork by searching various 'net sites and then automatically embeds is as a tag in every track... and it works for FLAC too

I have all my music stored as <artist>\<album>\<track>.<title> and if you simply drag and drop the artist folder onto the MuvEnUm workspace is auto finds the artwork for each album list as a folder

It's the best I've found

What do you have the content type set to?

Do I need to have the content type set to "All Content Type"?

I have the music set for Music only.

Also folder has to be capitalized for it to be found?

I'm unsure whether your setup is similar to mine, but I serve Twonky from a NAS and use my Denon 4308 Receiver as the client. I can use the small Denon screen or the TV to view the music.

When you embed the artwork as a tag, you just need to search for music in your music folder(s). The tag is then auto displayed for whichever track is played. Does that help?

I am running Twonky on my PC and I use the Dlink DSM-520 for the media player.

None of my coverart is embedded in the tags. I have each album in its own folder with coverart named folder.jpg or folder.jpeg.

In twonky server I have the content shared as Music only. Not as all content.

I would give it a try on a single track.

MP3Tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) will enable you to load 1 or all your track at once and then automatically tag 1 or all your tracks with artwork.

If you don't already have it, it's freeware... give it a go and see what happens.

On the toolbar, one of the first few icons is a "folder with a tick", use this to open the folder containing the track(s) you want to tag. (if you select the highest folder, i.e. "music", then it will load all the music in all subfolders below it.). I believe you might be able to also drag and drop tracks onto it's workspace.

Once the track(s) is listed, highlight it. Then mid way along the toolbar is an icon "Aa" with an arrow on it. Click it (you need to have a track highlighted first). Now select "import cover from file" from the drop down list. Select the format and in your case it's "folder.jpg" or "folder.jpeg". Once you click ok, it will work and auto save the tag.

If you right click on any of the column headers, you can customise the columns and add artwork related columns to check whether it has imported the tag.

Hope this helps.

unholyone wrote: Do I need to have the content type set to "All Content Type"?

No, but you could

I have the music set for Music only.

Works for me

Also folder has to be capitalized for it to be found?

YES YES YES

The folder name doesn't have to be capitalised... or at least they are all lowercase in my config

nutts wrote:The folder name doesn't have to be capitalised... or at least they are all lowercase in my config

In your case it sees your embedded art, the folder.jpg is not seen, which you don't notice because of the embedded art...

I've found that if I embedded album art in my mp3 files, my D-link DSM-320 displays all file lengths as 3:20.
I have no idea if that is Twonkyvision's fault or the DSM-320's.
Moving the artwork to a folder.jpg file cleared the problem, and the DSM-320 doesn't display artwork anyway.

Please note that - depending on the firmware version - the DSM-520 has issues with album art images beeing >= 300x300.
You may want to test with a smaller picture (e.g. 200x200).

MP3Tag worked great for me to automate the process of inserting resized images into the mp3 files.

Mike

There's something I can't figure out:

I have a large collection of FLAC files, properly tagged with embedded cover arts using MP3tag soft. However, about 30% of the cover arts are not displayed when using the "Songbook" soft on my iPod Touch.

From what has been written, it may depend on the cover art pixel size (300x300 max?). Any idea, if that is the case or how to fix the problem. It is somewhat annoying...

Cheers,
SMSWAP

By the way: The Twonky service is unbelieveable... clearly the worst and most blunt I have ever experienced...

Hi

I have about 14000 FLAC files (on a NAS) and have found that art is really buggy in TM4. Initially, I had so many missing ones that the whole concept of showing art seemed almost pointless, but after some excellent info from Audiokaas and confirmed by experimentation of my own, I now have art displayed for all my albums.

I initially had all FLAC's with embedded art and with Folder.jpg’s but found that a significant quantity didn't display. I then tried all embedded art with no Folder.jpg’s (I used a bulk rename utility to strip the change the Folder.jpg to Folder.bak) and still had a significant quantity not displaying. I then removed all the embedded art and just having Folder.jpg’s in the FLAC directories and many more displayed. I then had to remove all apostrophes and ampersands from the directory paths (things like B52’s have to be renamed to B52s and Black & Blue to Black and Blue) and yet more art appeared (see here for more info). I then removed all other images from the directories containing the Folder.jpg images (including png’s) and even more displayed (simply create a new subdirectory for each album where you wish to store other cover art). I ended up with only 6 albums where the art simply wouldn’t display and sorted them out by embedding the art into the FLAC files for the 6 albums (and deleting the Folder.jpg’s).

Art rules
So the rules seem to be as follows:
Use Folder.jpg’s in the FLAC directories
No other images in the same directory as the Folder.jpg’s
No ampersands or apostrophes in the directory names
Don’t use embedded art as a rule but it can be a useful option with a stubborn few which don’t pick up the Folder.jpg’s

Incidentally, since TM resizes the art to 160x160 pixels, I decided to resize all my images to that size manually. I’m not sure if it makes much difference but thought it might help the quality by resampling them with Paint Shop Pro as opposed to resizing them using TM

Container Limitation
For a big collection, you need to set the 'Albums' in Twonky music tree to ABC=1 as you can only show 100 items per virtual container. With ABC=1 as above, you can have art showing for 100 albums beginning with A, 100 with B, 100 with C etc. You can then browse the albums with the art displayed.

To clarify this 100 limitation: if you have only 100 albums, all will show artwork when clicking on albums (with the tree set as normal). If you have a few hundred, set the Album tree ABC to 3 to get ABC, DEF, GHI etc. If you have 1000+ albums, set the ABC=1 as above to separate them into 26 virtual containers (26 alphabetical categories).

Hope that helps and gives you a few ideas to try out.

Bri

Wow Bri! This is a great summary of all the work arounds on this subject. Quite honestly, the fact that Twonky is so weird on this particular subject is quite frustrating. I am actually not prepared to rework my 20k+ FLAC files.

To my suprise, Twonky is getting better with each rescan of the database. Almost all my pop music is (after several scans) now correctly displayed, using embedded images within the Tags.

The later added Classical ones work only partly. It appears, that when the enhanced Tags (Composer, Album Artist, Conductor) is set are used, cover arts display becomes an arbitrary issue. Some work, other don't and when checking them with MP3tag, their Tag formats and set-up is identical...

If anyone should come along with another server software replacing Twonky: I am your man!

Cheers, SMSWAP

It is an impressive job listing all the does and donts to work around the Twnky bugs.

To me this is no solution. Embedded coverart has many advantages over tousands of jpgs all called "folder.jpg".. Totally confusing and pointless if you want to reorganize your collection.

Same with using "windows 3.1" style naming conventions. We are living in the year 2009 (almost) and not in 1985!!

Lets get the Twonky guys to wake up and fix their product they're charging us for!

I bought Twonky and I am also having problems with the coverart. I am using am using a PS3 as the client and I haven't been able to get it to work. I really don't understand all these work arounds either as it should just work. Let me start from the beginnig.
I started off using Windows Media Player. It was sloppy and hard to organize. I also couldn't get internet radio on MP to work on the PS3. The inbedded coverart in my music files did show up but was sparadic and inconsistent with no rhyme or reason. I never tried adding the coverart to the DVDs but I am trying now with Twonky.
I then switched and started using Tversity. I was able to play internet radio stations and I was happy for a short time. My happiness ended when my audio library got too large for Tversity to stream. It was good to about 4000 tracks, I have over 6700 audio tracks and Tversity was only loading the same 150 to 200 to the PS3 when connected. Knowing that my library was going to continue to grow I looked for another media server.
I tried PS3 Media Server. It was freeware and designed specifically for the PS3 but the audio view was by album/folder view show there was no shuffling of all my audio and there was no internet radio. The coverart for the audio tracks performed about the same as MP and Tversity.
I am now trying Twonky as I was led to beleive it had internet radio and could better handle my media volume. Twonky has been a challenge. Yes it can handle my media volume. But as for the internet radio...it doesn't work on the PS3. Twonky also isn't showing any of my audio coverart either. I tried added the jpg file but nothing, might be the captial F in Folder.jpg I missed. I am not looking forward to this kind of work around with the number of albums in my music collection and the over 600 movie/tv series titles in my video collection. There has got to be a better way.

Hi

I used a bulk rename utility to change all my art to Folder.jpg (just took a few minutes) but to be honest, I did see a lot of art when they were called folder.jpg. Try renaming one and then select do a full Twonky database rebuild and see if it shows after that. Also note the issue with ampersands and apostrophes in the path names.

Hope that helps
Bri

Embedding cover art is the way forward, as it works correctly if you "odds and ends" directories, where many items in the same folder have different artwork, as the Folder.jpg only shows the first track.

I have embedded artwork in 100% of my collection, and NOTHING gets on my mediaserver without 100% correct tags and 100% embedded artwork.

By maintaining a pristine collection, I don't get quirks caused by different Artist and Album Artist tags and things like that.

PS. MediaMonkey is a great product for keeping your media collection in order, it's scripting is uberpowerful, you cna easilly find tags that are broken and tracks without embedded art etc, and fix using Amazon album art.

Just to clarify. I can see the coverart for audio and video in Twonky Media Manager on my desktop. I don't see the coverart when streaming to my PS3.

Is there a setting I missed TM that lets you view the coverart while streaming to a device, specifically a PS3?

What did you mean by "Twonky database rebuild"? A rescan or a complete reinstall????

Mediamokey is only good for audio but not for video...correct???

Ahh, if you have coverart elsewhere, then it's not a problem with the art itself.

Try the 5.055 server build, it fixes PS3 not displaying coverart, and client detection problems, or wait a few days, and some new server builds should be up...

mgillespie wrote:Embedding cover art is the way forward, as it works correctly if you "odds and ends" directories, where many items in the same folder have different artwork, as the Folder.jpg only shows the first track.

I have embedded artwork in 100% of my collection, and NOTHING gets on my mediaserver without 100% correct tags and 100% embedded artwork.

Hi

That's very interesting! As you probably know from my previous posts, I found that with TMS4xx, embedded art cause me major problems and I thus only used Folder.jpg's (one in each album directory). I am wondering if TMS5 has now completely addressed this as it would certainly be the ideal way forward. It's something I was intending to check out really soon (in the next week or so) so it's useful to know that you've looked at this already. Is your collection mainly MPG, FLAC or both (I don't know if that'll make a difference but it would be useful to know as much as possible in advance).

I'll try embedded only art on my test NAS as soon as I get a moment; it's now had that many rebuilds that the poor wee thing has smoke coming out of it

Bri

Thanks mgillespie, 5.0.55 did the trick. All album art showing now on the PS3 and all the coverart I added for the video now show.

Is there a way to embed coverart in video files after the file has been created? Manually adding coverart via the Folder.jpg is going to take some time.

Briain wrote:

mgillespie wrote:Embedding cover art is the way forward, as it works correctly if you "odds and ends" directories, where many items in the same folder have different artwork, as the Folder.jpg only shows the first track.

I have embedded artwork in 100% of my collection, and NOTHING gets on my mediaserver without 100% correct tags and 100% embedded artwork.

Hi

That's very interesting! As you probably know from my previous posts, I found that with TMS4xx, embedded art cause me major problems and I thus only used Folder.jpg's (one in each album directory). I am wondering if TMS5 has now completely addressed this as it would certainly be the ideal way forward. It's something I was intending to check out really soon (in the next week or so) so it's useful to know that you've looked at this already. Is your collection mainly MPG, FLAC or both (I don't know if that'll make a difference but it would be useful to know as much as possible in advance).

I'll try embedded only art on my test NAS as soon as I get a moment; it's now had that many rebuilds that the poor wee thing has smoke coming out of it

Bri

I am with mgillespie here. Embedded coverart is a lot cleaner and you can be sure your coverart is in the right plac eof you happen to reorganize your folders. You can never be sure with thsousends of files called "folder.jpg".

I found that it also works perfectly well with Twonky verison 4.4.9 (and higher releases of veriosn 4 I would assume but havent tested) as long as you have the box ticked to disable rescaling of pictures/coverart. It even displays coverart for the "infamous" special character usage in folder and file names, If you dont tick that box it does cause problems of all kind.

Coverart also display in veriosn 5.0.55 but there is a problem with pixelation of the art, which is most likely due to the fact that the option to disable picture rescaling is no longer available it thta Veriosn of Twonky.

I would assume that Twonky is giving us this back in some of the coming releases. I understand version 5.0.6x is on the way during the coming days.

-bump

Coverart also display in veriosn 5.0.55 but there is a problem with pixelation of the art, which is most likely due to the fact that the option to disable picture rescaling is no longer available it thta Veriosn of Twonky.

Hi

I had resampled all my (Folder.jpg) art to TMS4's native 160x160 size and it shows really well on both TMS4 and TMS5. I've tried a series of test tracks with test-card's of varying higher resolutions, but it looks like TMS5.0.55 resizes them all back to 160x160 (though it could be my UPnP control point which is resizing them; I've yet to find out which it is) and this can cause them to look poor (they're best resampled). Below are the original and below that are the ones displayed (the resizing issue can be best seen in the 320x320). The originals and displayed results (for 9 different sizes) can be seen here and here respectively.

I'll wait to see what happens with the next version then experiment further.
Bri

oh, that sounds like lot of work which I dont want to go thru. Also I quite like my art in higher res (betweenn 500x500 and 700x700) as I also use PC software (JRiver Media Center) to organize my library and such small "thumbs" wouldnt make me happy.

I happily wait until Tonwky may one day have fixed this - or just I'll just stick with version 4 which even on a very small screen like Apple ipod Touch displays the coverart in a beautiful resolution.

-bump

Bump or anyone

All my audio files have coverart embeded but can't find a way to embed coverart into video files. Do you know a program or a way to embed coverart into avi or divx or mpeg files. I understand that itu for mac can embed coverart into mov files. I haven't been able to find a tool for the PC.

Thanks

Hi

Yes, I'd certainly not change anything if I'd already had high res art; you are as well to wait and see what happens. Sorry, I've not had any experience with non-music formats. That said, I was at the Kaleidescape tech boot camp recently and they seem to have the tagging extremely well sorted for video files (and in fact all other types of files) but they use a bespoke (closed) system. I can see why it’s not available to others though as they’ve put a lot of time and effort into it and it’s continuously updated as new material is released.

My intension is to get my head round the video stuff as soon as I've put the floor and mains wiring back in my TV room (nothing to stream them to at the moment so I can't really test anything).

Bri

PS Interested that you're using all embedded art. I tried this ages ago with the early art-capable TMS4 (4.4.6 I think) and about 20% was missing. I'm going to try a bulk art insert with TMS 5 and delete all the Folder.jpg's to see how it performs. Don't worry; I have a test NAS as well as my working one!!

ckobmc wrote:Bump or anyone

All my audio files have coverart embeded but can't find a way to embed coverart into video files. Do you know a program or a way to embed coverart into avi or divx or mpeg files. I understand that itu for mac can embed coverart into mov files. I haven't been able to find a tool for the PC.

Thanks

To be honest, I am only starting investingating Twonky on Video. I got a lot of vdieo files that are in Nero's MP4 AVC format, but I have not really found any program so far that would allow to store tags inside. Not even sure this works at all on video files...

But as I said, I am a "child" if it comes to experience playing with video files in Twonky... I'm glad I finally got it all working with my audio! But one day I'll investigate some serious time into this video stuff - there must be a way to get this working as well

Briain wrote:Hi
PS Interested that you're using all embedded art. I tried this ages ago with the early art-capable TMS4 (4.4.6 I think) and about 20% was missing. I'm going to try a bulk art insert with TMS 5 and delete all the Folder.jpg's to see how it performs. Don't worry; I have a test NAS as well as my working one!!

It's worth giving it a try. both verison 4.4.9 and 5.0.55 display 100% of my coverart stored internally in my FLACs. As I said, the only issue in version 5.0.55 is that its pixelated. I hope the Twonky folks get this fixed in one of the nxt releases.

There is one overdue anyway, isnt there? Rick promised one "mid this week" - now the week is over

Hi

I noticed that when using Folder.jpg only, a couple albums didn't display art (solved by embedding) and also that a few tracks caused my control point (KinskyPDA) to flag an art error and crash.

I just used dBpoweramp to embed all the art and it's solved all these issues! I’ve just used a bulk rename facility to rename all the Folder.jpg's to EmbeddedArtBac (with no jpg extension), I’ve deleted the contents of the default.view directory and I am doing a TMS5.0.55 database rebuild now.

My first impression (of having both embedded and Floder.jpg's) is that TMS5 is performing absolutely fabulously (way better than just having Folder.jpg’s) so I'm totally delighted!!!

I'll let you know how I get on with the embedded only test as in a few hours.

Bri

NB All my art comprises 160x160 images so I'm not looking at the resize/rescale capabilities.

good to hear that your art problems are solved by embedding the coverart. Makes the whole organisation so much tidier, doesnt it?

Hi

Yes, I started out with embedded only but the earlier versions of TMS4.4 missed quite a lot of them.

As I said in the previous post, I tried it with both embedded and Fonder.jpg and it worked well. I've just this second tried it with embedded only and it now seems to load the artworks at about the same rate as a machinegun fires bullets; it’s way better again! This is a fantastic improvement and I'm off to now do the same to my working NAS.

Fantastic job; well done PV!!!!

Dont give them too much praise. Thats jsut *one* thing they got right. The other is the composer tag support. But plenty of things are still to be sorted, all of those reported o nthis forum, so just a quick summary of the top 5 issues here:

1.) coverart/pictures scaling issues (option missing to turn rescaling off)
2.) rescan issues (see thread above)
3.) No front-end to customize music trees
4.) Database is a big mess with large libraries
5.) Much slower than version 4.4.9 (probably related to point 4.)

I'm sure we get there.... eventually

-bump

Hi

Indeed, these need attention.

I actually find the operation of TMS 5 a bit faster than TMS4 (particularly at sending art when browsing many albums in the album container) but that loading a list of text (like a list of artists) seems a bit slower. I also find that the discovery time seems a bit slower (but from reading the FAQ section, am guessing that's due to the UPnP protocols being adhered to more closely than before).

Bri

Hello.

I asked something like this post in
http://www.twonkyforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6382

Can anyone help me??

Thanks.

I used to have art on my PS3, but since 5.0.X it has been missing. I have "Folder.jpg"'s (that capitalization) in many folders, but they don't show up in the browser on the server nor on the PS3.

Could somebody describe what I need to do, to get this working? 5.0.61 fixed nothing in this regard.I will gladly use another way of doing it if I could read about it somewhere, but it seems like my TMS was lacking the doc dir when I installed it?

Edit: My images are jpg and 160x160.

staun wrote:I used to have art on my PS3, but since 5.0.X it has been missing. I have "Folder.jpg"'s (that capitalization) in many folders, but they don't show up in the browser on the server nor on the PS3.

Could somebody describe what I need to do, to get this working? 5.0.61 fixed nothing in this regard.I will gladly use another way of doing it if I could read about it somewhere, but it seems like my TMS was lacking the doc dir when I installed it?

Edit: My images are jpg and 160x160.

Go into the Media Receivers page in the web interface, and make sure your PS3 is identified correctly. I had initial detection problems on upgrade and saw no album art (amongst other problems), rseting the client table fixed it for me.

Hello everyone.

I would like a solution.

I asked in this post: http://www.twonkyforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6382

I think that it´s possible to resolve, it´s a big "bug"

Regards!

This is the answer to your question...

Briain wrote:Hi

I have about 14000 FLAC files (on a NAS) and have found that art is really buggy in TM4. Initially, I had so many missing ones that the whole concept of showing art seemed almost pointless, but after some excellent info from Audiokaas and confirmed by experimentation of my own, I now have art displayed for all my albums.

I initially had all FLAC's with embedded art and with Folder.jpg’s but found that a significant quantity didn't display. I then tried all embedded art with no Folder.jpg’s (I used a bulk rename utility to strip the change the Folder.jpg to Folder.bak) and still had a significant quantity not displaying. I then removed all the embedded art and just having Folder.jpg’s in the FLAC directories and many more displayed. I then had to remove all apostrophes and ampersands from the directory paths (things like B52’s have to be renamed to B52s and Black & Blue to Black and Blue) and yet more art appeared (see here for more info). I then removed all other images from the directories containing the Folder.jpg images (including png’s) and even more displayed (simply create a new subdirectory for each album where you wish to store other cover art). I ended up with only 6 albums where the art simply wouldn’t display and sorted them out by embedding the art into the FLAC files for the 6 albums (and deleting the Folder.jpg’s).

Art rules
So the rules seem to be as follows:
Use Folder.jpg’s in the FLAC directories
No other images in the same directory as the Folder.jpg’s
No ampersands or apostrophes in the directory names
Don’t use embedded art as a rule but it can be a useful option with a stubborn few which don’t pick up the Folder.jpg’s

Incidentally, since TM resizes the art to 160x160 pixels, I decided to resize all my images to that size manually. I’m not sure if it makes much difference but thought it might help the quality by resampling them with Paint Shop Pro as opposed to resizing them using TM

Container Limitation
For a big collection, you need to set the 'Albums' in Twonky music tree to ABC=1 as you can only show 100 items per virtual container. With ABC=1 as above, you can have art showing for 100 albums beginning with A, 100 with B, 100 with C etc. You can then browse the albums with the art displayed.

To clarify this 100 limitation: if you have only 100 albums, all will show artwork when clicking on albums (with the tree set as normal). If you have a few hundred, set the Album tree ABC to 3 to get ABC, DEF, GHI etc. If you have 1000+ albums, set the ABC=1 as above to separate them into 26 virtual containers (26 alphabetical categories).

Hope that helps and gives you a few ideas to try out.

Bri

Also make sure you are using MS 5.0.55.