VLC displaying wrong album art

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lukpac
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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby lukpac » 31 Jul 2019 17:06

THIS IS THE NEW SOLUTION

1. Step: delete everything from this folder "%appdata%/VLC/art/"
2. Step: Go to Tools > Preferences > Interface > (Tab) Privacy/Network Interaction > (untick the box) Allow metadata network access.
3. Step: Save

PS: It would be so much nicer if these folks from the VideoLan fixed this issue permanently/once for all :)
BUT
for now this worked for me

Enjoy :)
That doesn't work. I just played two FLAC files from the same album with different art. When I played the first file, the cover was loaded into the art folder, and when playing the second file, the cached art from the first file is used.
Can you or anyone give full correct Win10 path? I am not finding

"%appdata%/VLC/art/"

and the frontslashes make me think this is linux

I have only

C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC

and no art folder ...

tyvm!

%appdata%\VLC\art\

As noted, it doesn't actually fix the issue though.

the_durkster
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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby the_durkster » 14 Sep 2019 16:28

With Windows 10 and the current version of VLC 3.0.8, the album art saves within the folder of the music album you are listening to. You will need to click on the 'View' tab inside the folder and then on the 'Options' drop down arrow on the right hand side. Click on 'Change folder and search options' and then on the 'View' tab of the Folder Options Dialog Box. Scroll down and click on 'Hide protected operating system files (recommended)' to unselect the arrow. Answer yes to the pop up warning and then on 'Apply' and 'OK' to close the box. You may also need to delete the 'Art' folder which is found in 'your_profile_name\AppData\Roaming\vlc\'. The long path is: C:\Users\your_profile_name\AppData\Roaming\vlc. So, while the system files are being displayed, follow this path and delete the 'Art' folder if one is found there.

All of the files to do with playing the music and displaying the art will now be seen within each folder of your music files. Look for an image file called 'Folder.jpg'. This is the file you will need to replace in order to change what displays within VLC while your music is being played. I found the proper album art by simply going to Google, searching for the album by name and clicking on 'Images' when the search page comes up. This displays all of the images Google has on file for the particular album you're searhing for. When you find the proper album cover look for the size of 500 X 500 or 600 X 600, if available, and click on it to display the full sized image on the right side of the screen. Right-click on the full sized image and click on 'Save Picture As' and save it to your music folder as 'Folder.jpg'. When the Pop-up asks if you want to replace the image 'Folder.jpg' click on 'Yes'. The proper Album Art will now display within VLC while your music is playing.

(Remember to reverse the process and turn off displaying hidden files and folders before finishing or else you will see them being displayed everywhere including your desktop) :-)

Please remember that VLC is Open Source, free software so we need to be sensitive to the fact that every feature will not always be functioning exactly as everyone wants it to. So, sometimes it will be up to us to figure these things out, and then post the answer when we get a solution to the problem at hand. Hope this helps.

gazooka
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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby gazooka » 18 Oct 2019 11:57

It seems that VLC sometimes automatically creates the Folder.jpg Albumartsmall.jpg in the folder where the music resides in case it doesn't find any other album art to be displayed. These files were what caused the same album art to show up all the time in VLC regardless of what song I played.

However it may not be enough to untick the 'Hide protected operating system files (recommended)' in order for the file to show up.

There are actually (at least?) two independent ways in which a file can be prevented from being displayed.

The first is if the 'Hide protected operating system files (recommended)' is ticked as described in several earlier posts.

The second is if the file has the system attribute set. Then it won't be displayed regardless of the setting of the tick mark mentioned above. In order to find out if this is the case you need to open a command line window, in Window 10 preferrably the PowerShell, by left clicking the Windows icon and selecting Windows PowerShell. This will open a command line window.

Change to the drive and directory where your music files are stored (cd path to your music directory including the drive letter, e.g. "cd d:\MyMusic".)

Now give these commands to check if the invisible files exist

dir -force Folder.jpg

dir -force AlbumArtSmall.jpg

If they exist you can now remove the problematic attributes by the commands. (Note that both the hidden and the system attribute must be removed at the same time.)

attrib -s -h Folder.jpg

attrib -s -h AlbumArtSmall.jpg

Now they should be visible in a normal Explorer window and can thus be deleted.

This at least prevented the same album art to show up for me all the time. Instead I got the VLC cone when using drag and drop, but double clicking a song to play it in VLC resulted in the correct album art.

78rpmuser
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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby 78rpmuser » 28 Nov 2019 14:12

I maintain a folder with a jpeg image of every record label for each 78rpm song I have stored on my computer. When I use "Add Cover Art From File" and provide the proper file name within that folder, it initially is correct but subsequently, even sometimes while I'm still on the "Current Media Information" screen it changes to some other songs label or non record label image. What am I doing wrong? I would have thought my selected image would have been stored as part of the metadata, but an image from some other source often overrides it.

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby shadowfax » 12 Jan 2020 04:20

Hello,

I figured out a simple workaround by perusing this topic and the many others that have been posted on various forums over the years, so I wanted to share. I am using Windows 7 but hopefully it works for 10 as well.

In the art folder for VLC's AppData, each album has an "art" file. For me, there is no file type; it simply displays as a "file". Simply delete this file, download a picture of the album cover into the folder and rename it "art". Voila!

On a side note, it's bizarre that it's 2020 and this has never been properly fixed.

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby mmortal03 » 13 Apr 2020 12:45


That doesn't work. I just played two FLAC files from the same album with different art. When I played the first file, the cover was loaded into the art folder, and when playing the second file, the cached art from the first file is used.
Same here. I listen to a podcast that has different artwork for each show, but VLC just pulls the artwork for the first show played, and then re-uses that for all the rest of the shows, unless I clear out the VLC album art folder for the podcast each time.

78rpmuser
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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby 78rpmuser » 04 May 2020 17:58

Hello,

I figured out a simple workaround by perusing this topic and the many others that have been posted on various forums over the years, so I wanted to share. I am using Windows 7 but hopefully it works for 10 as well.

In the art folder for VLC's AppData, each album has an "art" file. For me, there is no file type; it simply displays as a "file". Simply delete this file, download a picture of the album cover into the folder and rename it "art". Voila!

On a side note, it's bizarre that it's 2020 and this has never been properly fixed.
Where do you find "VLC's AppData"? I found in Program Files (x86) under VLC, a folder lua with a folder art. I deleted the files shown and replaced them with my own art files. It still didn't work. So, I tried Program Files under VLC and found art folder in meta folder and did the same there. Still no success.

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby Lotesdelere » 05 May 2020 08:35

Where do you find "VLC's AppData"?

Type in this in the address bar of your file explorer: %APPDATA%\vlc\

78rpmuser
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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby 78rpmuser » 19 May 2020 19:35

Thanks for the reply. That does seem to work.

carajo
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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby carajo » 28 May 2020 16:28

After reading all the posts i get this conclusion:

1: If you edit your tags and covers with another tagger usually they will get embeded on the file.
2: If you start VLC and drop a group of files to the playlist, first it will create a hidden folder in Users/Your User/appdata/roaming/VLC/art/arturl with all the highres images named "art" in as many folders as files you dropped. Those folders use some algorithm to be named unique but we need to now the tags and order VLC uses to create the name of each folder.
3: When you save the playlist another folder is created with the short version of the images distributed by artists, etc.
4: I presume that this process has the intention to accelerate the reading of graphic metadata the next time you play the list.
5: If you next change the metadata of that files probably VLC will not actualize the current data stored (sometimes because that file comes from another source and windows prevents the system to do it as I discoverd in some of them).
6: The solution pointed here is to show hidden folders in windows, search for the folder "art" mentioned, delete it and empty the trust. This will force VLC to recreate the new data (you will need to drop all you files again (just pray to get only one playlist).
7: There is a bug here again (this is not mentioned by some people here because they didn't find the case) ...this is when you get different "Artist" but the same "Track name" or the same "Artist". The result in this case is that you will get the first created cover for both songs with the same image, independently of the "Artist".
8: So for me the solution exposed here is a temporary and incomplete workaround for the problem.
9: The solution may be to rewrite the algorithm employed to asingn the name of the folders data of VLC. May be it's looking recursively in the present metadata of the files to generate the name by "Artist" "Track Title" and probably "Album Title" if present (that's the reason of some people get solved when changed this label data) in the short version of the covers but in the folder "arturl" it is asociating the cover with "TrackTitle" and then "Artist". You can make the experiment with two different tracks with the same title or fifferent groups with the same name as I did.
10: Hope to see a new version to resolve this bugs, they are very annoying.

Sorry for my english, regards from Spain.

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby kilickerem066 » 06 Mar 2021 10:50

Finally, I have found the solution to fix this on Windows.

Step 1) Make a batch file. Put it in any folder you want (I put it in the Documents folder). After you created a batch file, open it in Notepad (right-click the batch file and select Edit), and type:

@echo off
cd %AppData%\vlc
rmdir art /s /q
exit

Step 2) [Optional] Convert it to an EXE file. Use a batch to exe converter to convert the batch file to an exe. This is optional, but if you want to hide the console window, this can be useful.

Step 3) Enable 'application start' logging. To do this, open Run box (by pressing Win+R), type secpol.msc, click OK. This will open up Local Security Policy. Navigate to Local Policies/Audit Policy, and then double-click Audit Process Tracking. Tick the "Success" box, and then click OK. Now you can close Local Security Policy.

Step 4) Create a task to automatically run batch file after VLC closes. To do this, open Run box again (by pressing Win+R), type taskschd.msc, click OK. This will open up Task Scheduler. Click "Create task..." on the right corner. Give it a name. And then, go to Triggers tab, and then create a new trigger. Make sure to choose "On an event" as the trigger. After that, choose Custom, and then add an event trigger. Change the Filter settings like this:

Choose "By log"
Event logs: Security
Task category: Process Creation
Keywords: Audit Success
Box that will appear that is on top of "Task category": 4689

After changing the settings, go to XML tab, enable "Edit query manually". Click OK if any warning boxes appear. Change the XML to this:

<QueryList>
<Query Id="0" Path="Security">
<Select Path="Security">
*[System[Provider[@Name='Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing'] and Task = 13313 and (band(Keywords,9007199254740992)) and (EventID=4689)]]
and
*[EventData[Data[@Name='ProcessName'] and (Data='C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe')]]
</Select>
</Query>
</QueryList>

Click OK, and then click OK again. Now go to Action tab, and then create a new action. Action should be "Start a Program", and then click "Browse", and choose batch file that you made in step 1. After that, click OK, click OK again. Now you can close Task Scheduler.

Step 5) Test it! Now, the problem should be fixed. But the batch file will run with 1 second delay, so you should wait about 1 or 2 second(s) after closing VLC.

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby RenderSys1608 » 15 May 2021 16:26

Hi, I have a problem that may be similar to what is currently happening but not like the OP.

A song I downloaded, tagged, and gave the album art myself, somehow showed a different album to what I have set it as (the album art I set had the words "De Hofnar" and is mainly white and blue, however vlc displays a different image with the words "Hekandi Summer of Sax" mainly in the color of red and has the image of a woman with a sax).

I don't recall ever using the image or ever seeing it in my entire life and so I thought it might be a hidden image within the folder where my music was located however I couldn't find such image and searched for it within %appdata%/vlc/art/arturl/ and found the album art (art.jfif).
At first it didn't have an extension and so I simply loaded it into notepad and saw the extension. The code for the folder of it was located at was "04f7730ea06fa296ebf3d1cd61374963."

The problem occurred when I launched the song after sometime of not listening to it. At 00:03 of listening to it, the album art disappeared and so I pressed CTRL+L to show the playlist so that I could see the mini-player when using the playlist and when it I checked at the mini-player it had shown the different album art I expected. Pressing CTRL+L again just shows a black screen (should've been the album art or the VLC logo). For now I'll keep the playing on pause and try not to close it.

I wonder if this is a feature in VLC 3.0.14 Vetinari in which is automatically downloads the ablum art for it (although I don't really believe that is a real thing since the it should've worked is because there was no album art in the first place).

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby RenderSys1608 » 03 Jul 2021 09:16

Hi, I have a problem that may be similar to what is currently happening but not like the OP.

A song I downloaded, tagged, and gave the album art myself, somehow showed a different album to what I have set it as (the album art I set had the words "De Hofnar" and is mainly white and blue, however vlc displays a different image with the words "Hekandi Summer of Sax" mainly in the color of red and has the image of a woman with a sax).

I don't recall ever using the image or ever seeing it in my entire life and so I thought it might be a hidden image within the folder where my music was located however I couldn't find such image and searched for it within %appdata%/vlc/art/arturl/ and found the album art (art.jfif).
At first it didn't have an extension and so I simply loaded it into notepad and saw the extension. The code for the folder of it was located at was "04f7730ea06fa296ebf3d1cd61374963."

The problem occurred when I launched the song after sometime of not listening to it. At 00:03 of listening to it, the album art disappeared and so I pressed CTRL+L to show the playlist so that I could see the mini-player when using the playlist and when it I checked at the mini-player it had shown the different album art I expected. Pressing CTRL+L again just shows a black screen (should've been the album art or the VLC logo). For now I'll keep the playing on pause and try not to close it.

I wonder if this is a feature in VLC 3.0.14 Vetinari in which is automatically downloads the ablum art for it (although I don't really believe that is a real thing since the it should've worked is because there was no album art in the first place).
So apparently this was a feature in VLC but I never bothered to read it. It's asks about if VLC can search album data online, every time the VLC settings get reset.

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby burt8810 » 18 Aug 2021 03:44

kilickerem066
I tried your method however: I could NOT enter a value for Task category: it was grayed out.
"Choose "By log"
Event logs: Security
Task category: Process Creation
Keywords: Audit Success
Box that will appear that is on top of "Task category": 4689"

I copied and pasted your XML script.

Perhaps you might have some idea of what I am doing wrong.
Thanks,
Herb

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby burt8810 » 19 Aug 2021 19:38

Just to follow up.
I repeated the whole process on a Windows 7 Pro machine and it WORKED.
Although Task category: Process Creation was still grayed out. Just left it blank (that's what you do when you can't enter anything!).
My 2 failures were on Windows 10 Pro machines.
I will give them another try.

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby awvalenti » 27 Oct 2021 17:22

Hello. This bug is still present. When a song with title "a" is opened, its cover art is cached. When any other song with same title "a" is found, cover art from media file is ignored and instead VLC displays image from cache.

How to reproduce:
- Get a small audio file, e.g., audio.flac
- Make two images, 1.png and 2.png
- Use ffmpeg to generate two versions of same content:

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i audio.flac -i 1.png -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -disposition:v attached_pic -c copy -metadata title=SAME_TITLE_HERE -metadata:s:v title="Album cover" -metadata:s:v comment="Cover (front)" -y a1.flac ffmpeg -i audio.flac -i 2.png -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -disposition:v attached_pic -c copy -metadata title=SAME_TITLE_HERE -metadata:s:v title="Album cover" -metadata:s:v comment="Cover (front)" -y a2.flac
- Open a1.flac first, then close VLC and open a2.flac
- You'll see 1.png for both files, whereas you should see 2.png for a2.flac

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby burt8810 » 27 Oct 2021 20:35

awvalenti » 27 Oct 2021 11:22
Did you try the method shown in the following post?
kilickerem066 » 06 Mar 2021 04:50

I did and it works for me on both Windows 10 and Windows 7 machines.

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby burt8810 » 27 Oct 2021 20:38

Just to follow up.
I repeated the whole process on a Windows 7 Pro machine and it WORKED.
Although Task category: Process Creation was still grayed out. Just left it blank (that's what you do when you can't enter anything!).
My 2 failures were on Windows 10 Pro machines.
I will give them another try.
I tried this again on 2 Windows 10 machines and it worked on both of them.

Thanks, kilickerem066

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby awvalenti » 30 Oct 2021 16:44

awvalenti » 27 Oct 2021 11:22
Did you try the method shown in the following post?
kilickerem066 » 06 Mar 2021 04:50

I did and it works for me on both Windows 10 and Windows 7 machines.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't want to do that.

When I posted before, I had only seen the first page of this thread. Now I see there are several different situations where this bug occurs. Mine has nothing to do with network connection, VLC is simply caching local images and reading them in the wrong way.

Should we open a bug directly on VideoLAN Trac?

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby zibeltra » 26 Jan 2022 19:37

home/user/.cache/Vlc - delete

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby burt8810 » 27 Jan 2022 22:58

awvalenti
Mine had nothing to do with a network connection.
So far it is still working.

zibeltra
That fix did not work for me. YMMV

Herb

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby maganuna 05 » 05 Apr 2022 17:37

Hi everyone. First time here on Forums. So I tried the following as seen in the thread...

1. Step: delete everything from this folder "%appdata%/VLC/art/"
2. Step: Go to Tools > Preferences > Interface > (Tab) Privacy/Network Interaction > (untick the box) Allow metadata network access.
3. Step: Save

This really worked a treat and so grateful. Once I have the album art set, it displays the correct album cover BUT only ONE little thing now... When there's no album covers for songs or albums (yet) it just displays any album art. Anyway this could be rectified? Could it be just a setting as all art has been deleted as in Step 1

Really appreciate any help

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby burt8810 » 05 Apr 2022 22:23

maganuna 05,
This is the only one that has consistently worked for me:
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... 52#p515088
This is from March 2021.
YMMV

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby REDCHAMBER » 20 Apr 2022 19:28

Well, I don't know how to explain it well. But in my case, if in the folder where you store your music you placed an image, and the icon is visible on the cover of that folder, that thumbnail will be displayed in the VLC player impersonating the classic cone. Even if you delete that image inside, as long the icon is still stored in the folder the thing will still be there. It is best to create a clean folder and move all your music there avoiding sneaking some kind of image.

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Re: VLC displaying wrong album art

Postby verdigris » 06 Jul 2022 21:38

What baffles me is why there does not appear to be a setting to force VLC to read the album art direct from the media file tags every time, instead of looking for a cache or separate files within the album folder.

Devs please consider this a feature request.


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