Questions on disc and artist arts from a new user

[jpwilsch]

After 10 years using Subsonic then Airsonic, I decided to switch to a still maintained self hosted music streaming server.
I tried a few and made my mind on LMS. Great piece of software, light and fast, implementing the opensubsonic api, and french 🇫🇷 😄

I set everything up and running, and it works fine, along with Symfonium on my android phone.
My music is pretty simply organized, one folder per album, named <artist> - <year> - <album>, and each tracks in the album's folder named <track> - <artist> - <title>.
Each track is tagged only with those infos : title, artist, album, year, track (no MB's tags).
Each folder contains a folder.jpg file (album's cover) and some folders contains a cdart.jpg file (disc image).

I got a few newbie questions I want to ask to the LMS' community :

• how are the disc images used in LMS ? I edited the medium-image-file-names setting to add the "cdart" name, but I don't see my art displayed anywhere ? Where and when is it displayed ? Is it used also by opensubsonic api clients ?
• I tried to get images for artists. I read the readme part about artist image lookup, and dropped an artist.jpg file in some album folders, but it doesn't get displayed in the artist view. Do I miss something ?

Thank you in advance for your help 😀

[epoupon]

Hello!

First, you need to scan your collection to make sure your changes are taken into account (no need to enable the "Force scan all files" option, a simple scan should be enough for all use cases).
If you edit the lms.conf file, you need to restart the server to take it into account

For artist images, the recommended way is to set up an artist information folder, like in kodi, and create a dedicated folder for each artist, where you can place your artist image file. This will also allow you to add a bio for each artist, and also handle all contributor artists (composers, performers, producers, etc.)
Otherwise, the least worse organization would be <artist>/<year> - <album>/<tracks>. You can then place an artist.jpg image file in each <artist> folder.

For disc images, LMS only displays "discs" if at least one disc of the album has a name or if they are multiple discs, so check the discsubtitle tags if you want this image to be shown on single disc albums.
Then you will have additional disc entries in the UI, each with an associated disc image. As you will likely have a different disc image for each disc, the recommended layout would be <artist>/<year> - <album>/<disc>/<tracks>
For now, there are still ongoing discussions about the OpenSubsonic API definition to expose them, so they are not exposed to clients yet.

[jpwilsch]

Thank you Emeric for your answer.

I'll put aside the disc art thing for the moment, as it'll require quite some important work to tag everything, and won't have any impact on the opensubsonic api clients for now.

Regarding the artist images, I tried to implement what you explained, but hadn't been able to get it working.

Take this 2 albums organisation example :

/Albums/1995 - 2012 - Paris Sud Minute
/Albums/1995 - 2012 - Paris Sud Minute/01 - 1995 - Big Bang Théorie.mp3
(...)
/Albums/1995 - 2012 - Paris Sud Minute/17 - 1995 - C'est Ca Notre Vie.mp3
/Albums/1995 - 2012 - Paris Sud Minute/folder.jpg
/Albums/A State Of Mind - 2010 - Platypus Funk
/Albums/A State Of Mind - 2010 - Platypus Funk/01 - A State Of Mind - Age of the Platypus.mp3
(...)
/Albums/A State Of Mind - 2010 - Platypus Funk14 - A State Of Mind - Simile Soliloquy.mp3
/Albums/A State Of Mind - 2010 - Platypus Funk/folder.jpg

There's two artists : 1995 and A State Of Mind

I tried creating a
/Albums/Artists
folder and dropped artist images for each artist in a folder named after the artist :

/Albums/Artists/1995/artist.jpg
/Albums/Artists/A State Of Mind/artist.jpg

And launched a scan of the library configured as the /Albums folder. But couldn't have a artist image displayed.

I then tried the other organisation mentionned :

/Albums/1995/
/Albums/1995/artist.jpg
/Albums/1995/2012 - Paris Sud Minute/
/Albums/1995/2012 - Paris Sud Minute/01 - 1995 - Big Bang Théorie.mp3
(...)
/Albums/1995/2012 - Paris Sud Minute/17 - 1995 - C'est Ca Notre Vie.mp3
/Albums/1995/2012 - Paris Sud Minute/folder.jpg
/Albums/A State Of Mind/
/Albums/A State Of Mind/artist.jpg
/Albums/A State Of Mind/2010 - Platypus Funk
/Albums/A State Of Mind/2010 - Platypus Funk/01 - A State Of Mind - Age of the Platypus.mp3
(...)
/Albums/A State Of Mind/2010 - Platypus Funk14 - A State Of Mind - Simile Soliloquy.mp3
/Albums/A State Of Mind/2010 - Platypus Funk/folder.jpg

and faced the same non artist image displaying artist view :-(

To dig a little more into the artist info folder option, did I do it right ?
Does it's path has to be configured somewhere ?
Does it have chance to work if my mp3 files doesn't have a MB ArtistId tag ?
And if I doesn't have artist.nfo files ?
What would a minimal artist.nfo file for it to work ? Something like the following ?

<artist>
    <name>1995</name>
</artist>

Thank you again for your help, and for the great software that is LMS :-)

[epoupon]

I tried creating a /Albums/Artists folder and dropped artist images for each artist in a folder named after the artist :

/Albums/Artists/1995/artist.jpg
/Albums/Artists/A State Of Mind/artist.jpg

And launched a scan of the library configured as the /Albums folder. But couldn't have a artist image displayed.

That is unfortunately expected, you need an artist.nfo file for this method to work.

I then tried the other organisation mentionned :

/Albums/1995/
/Albums/1995/artist.jpg
/Albums/1995/2012 - Paris Sud Minute/
/Albums/1995/2012 - Paris Sud Minute/01 - 1995 - Big Bang Théorie.mp3
(...)
/Albums/1995/2012 - Paris Sud Minute/17 - 1995 - C'est Ca Notre Vie.mp3
/Albums/1995/2012 - Paris Sud Minute/folder.jpg
/Albums/A State Of Mind/
/Albums/A State Of Mind/artist.jpg
/Albums/A State Of Mind/2010 - Platypus Funk
/Albums/A State Of Mind/2010 - Platypus Funk/01 - A State Of Mind - Age of the Platypus.mp3
(...)
/Albums/A State Of Mind/2010 - Platypus Funk14 - A State Of Mind - Simile Soliloquy.mp3
/Albums/A State Of Mind/2010 - Platypus Funk/folder.jpg

and faced the same non artist image displaying artist view :-(

This is more suprising. Can you try to run lms-metadata on one of your file? I suspect the album artist is tagged as artist and not as albumartist. For this method to work, only album artist relationships are considered (it is very complicated to handle this properly at the artist level, as we have to deal with compilations, collaboration albums, etc.)

To dig a little more into the artist info folder option, did I do it right ?

If you refer to "I tried creating a /Albums/Artists folder and dropped artist images for each artist in a folder named after the artist", that's good start, but you do need artist.nfo files and name your image files according to the artist-info-image-file-names option.

Does it's path has to be configured somewhere ?

The root artist folder just does have to be somewhere in your scanned libraries (it can even be split over multiple libraries)

Does it have chance to work if my mp3 files doesn't have a MB ArtistId tag ?

Yes, mbid is mostly used in this context to unmerge unrelated artists that have the same name

And if I doesn't have artist.nfo files ? What would a minimal artist.nfo file for it to work ? Something like the following ?

<artist>
    <name>1995</name>
</artist>

It should work. Technically, name is not even mandatory (it will then fallback to the directory name). But don't forget about the artist-info-image-file-names: either put "artist" in the list or rename your files.

Thank you again for your help, and for the great software that is LMS :-)

Thanks, I hope we will eventually make it work :)

[jpwilsch]

Uh oh, just noticed something I should be ashamed not noticing before : as my server is still on Debian 12, I don't run the latest 3.71 release, but the previous 3.70, which is missing the #750 issue related commits and the new artist-info-image-file-names setting...

I was focusing on the artist-image-file-names setting (for my defense, names are quite similar 😅), which is for no help in this situation apparently.

Just asking 😉, but any chance you'll release bookworm packages until the eol ?
Otherwise, well, it looks like I'll have to do this "sed 's/bookworm/trixie/'" and "apt update && apt upgrade" that is on my todo list 😄

[epoupon]

Ah sorry I upgraded to Trixie so I have no easy way to generate bookworm packages.
Maybe you can try the docker image?

Otherwise, it should also work in 3.70, names are just not customizable.

[jpwilsch]

Managed to make it work ! \o/

With

/Albums/Artists/1995/artist.nfo
/Albums/Artists/1995/thumb.jpg
/Albums/Artists/A State Of Mind/artist.nfo
/Albums/Artists/A State Of Mind/thumb.jpg

and simple 'artist.nfo's (only the name tag), I now have nice artist images displayed on the artists list view, and the artist view. Awesome !

And I also have them in Symfonium when browsing album artists. Love it ! ❤️

Thank you Emeric, LMS rocks ! (and you too)

UPDATE : an even simple artist.nfo (just an empty <artist></artist> tag) is sufficient ;-)