Will the WD Live display album art that is in a file named “cover.jpg”?
According to the manual, WD Live first looks for files named “folder.jpg” but if it doesn’t find those displays “the first .jpg in the folder.” User Manual p.38.
Unfortunately, my WD Live doesn’t seem to do this. I’m not sure that I always know when the Media Library is up to date, so I thought I would ask before assuming this is another error in the manual (and renaming all my album art to “folder.jpg”!)
BTW, I discovered, after wasting a good deal of time (and receiving an incorrect response from WD support) that the WD Live will not display images in the .png format. See http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2742 This is contrary to a reasonable reading of the information on the bottom of page 37 of the User Manual.
*metathumbs and *jpg’s can’t coexist. You have to use one or the other.
If you use the internal scrapper (yes it is what fetches the images and metadata), then you can’t use .jpg if any .metathumbs exist in the same folder. This is because .metathumbs will override the jpg and the 1st .metathumb will be displayed.
To overcome that you need to change your “folder.jpg” to “1.metathumb” for folder art or depending on the name of your album you will need to name it something that will take first place in the order.
That or you will need to rename all your coverarts to .jpg, then you can use “folder.jpg” for folder.
You also can’t use “cover.jpg” for the albums, they have to named the album name (“your_album_name.jpg” or “your_album_name.metathumb”). This is how the all the songs for a particular album are tagged to display the cover art.
Does the internal scraper get metadata for audio files? I know it works for video files – quite well – but I’ve seen no evidence of it for audio files. I have re-scanned my audio files many dozens of times. “Cleared” the media library etc., but I’ve never seen any signs of downloaded metadata. How long does it take to scrape audio file data?
I guess the manual on displaying album art is wrong in just about every respect. The only respect in which it is somewhat correct is that folder.jpg files will be displayed in place of the generic folder icons. I am really sorry I wasted so much time reading the manual and changing my files to conform to what it said. And then waiting for answers to support “cases.” Maybe there should be a re-written, accurate manual as a wiki project.
I’ll give it a try. I was on this screen once and assumed that freebase was already selected since it was the only choice. I’ll affirmatively select it. Fingers crossed.
Thanks very much for your help, but is there a way to substitute another database that’s more comprehensive? (I routinely download cover art from last.fm for example. And last.fm has a very usable api.) The video scraper left only some bollywood movies unidentified. The audio one has apparently left 90% of my albums unidentified.
Does re-selecting freebase for each album do anything? Hasn’t WD Live already been through whatever process it uses? I’m not about to type in variants of every album name that doesn’t have content already scraped for it to see if anything pops up!
I think if I want to display cover art I’m back to re-naming all my cover art from cover.jpg to folder.jpg. That’s disappointing since I’ll bet I have six or seven scripts on my computer and two more on my phone that know that both filenames are used for cover art. Most of those also contemplate other file formats – png, for instance. Weird that the WD coders wouldn’t know that since one would think they might have looked at some other scripts first. (The manual writers apparently do but what’s in the manual didn’t get into the code!)
But I’m also thinking it’s not worth the bother since queuing any significant number of songs on this thing is ridiculously clumsy and time consuming. I may just go back to using an app on my phone to play music.
Freebase is actually part of the problem not the solution, it’s not a music cataloging service. It’s a piece of **bleep** as far as music is concerned. Why WD couldn’t use freedb, gracenote, musicbrainz or any other dedicated music service for that matter is beyond me.
