MX Linux Forum

Hi, guys!

I've been through a ton of recommended music players etc for editing id3 tags, album art cover, etc - but none of them seem to do what they claim.

It seems like Clementine and VLC album cover editors are also broken - seen lots of posts on other forums about this and no solutions.

I basically want an easy program (which actually works) for changing the album art of a song file.

Any help is welcome and appreciated.

Kid3-qt Does this just fine.
Navigate to the track you want, double click on the existing album art to get the popup album art menu, Import a new image.
If you want to embed an image in all the tracks in a folder, you can right click on one of the tracks in the left pane and select AlbumArt -> Embed Album Art and navigate to your image.

We also have the current kid3 3.9.2 in the MX test repos if you want to give it a spin.

Hey, guys!

Thanks for the replies!

I tried to give kid3 another shot, but same problems happening.

When I load any song with VLC (after modifying album-art with kid3), it will always show the picture of the last song I modified, regardless of which song I play (I

know, it's really weird).

But at least VLC is putting some effort to display "something", because clementine displays no album art whatsoever, just the default of that dancing-girl.

I even tried windows-only apps with Crossover/Wine, more or less same problems happening - it's so frustrating that something which would seem to be so trivial

seems like arduous task for programmers.

for the record, I always take care of the system with updates, re-installing the nvidia graphics driver after updates (necessary to keep top graphics performance), I

run FSCK from tty1 on a semi-regular basis, etc...

I know that this can't be a problem with my system.

Thanks anyways, guy, all replies greatly appreciated!

All the best. <3

Perhaps try one of those:

https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

https://docs.puddletag.net/

After doing some checking here, when I embed a different image in one track in a folder, strawberry, clementine, mpv, & qmplay2 all display it properly. VLC does not. VLC remembers the first image it saw in that folder.
Caveat - if an image is already embedded (as happens if you do the whole folder) you must delete the Picture: Cover tag from that track before dragging another image there.

Thanks for the replies, guys. I'll check them all out soon and let you know how it goes!

<3

No luck guys, thanks though - really appreciate the efforts.

Gonna have to settle for living in a world of mediocrity (for the most part - not talking about you).

That's a very common problem with free software (not talking about MX), developers are like, "hey, this is free, let it be crap" - you usually have to bring out your

wallet if you want something good - and even then I couldn't find anything.

Once again thank you so much for the time and efforts, guys, much appreciated. <3

The best there is is TagScanner but it's windows only. If you have access to a windows box Tagscanner will set VLC straight in a heartbeat. The site, https://www.xdlab.ru/en/, I had to use a Serbian vpn link just to grab it directly. One of my favorite softwares ever.
The other thing to consider is how you actually organize your music files. I use "cover.jpg" exclusively for every folder and if there are many pics I usually give them their own folder to cut down on library confusion. I gave up embedding stuff in my music files and just use deadbeef with the ddb_misc_filebrowser_GTK2/3 .so file addons instead. Easypeasy and no confusion on what is displayed.

In the meantime, here's a thread about why VLC does that (even if you delete the artwork first) (that happened to me, too)

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... 7&start=75

(Though this is about Windows, to give an idea)

Thanks for the replies, guys!

I tried tagscanner again, same problems...

Kinda xxxxxxx how someone can go through the task of composing music but not being able to attach artwork to the file...

Thanks for all the efforts, much appreciated guys.

I'll keep you posted if I find anything

Hey again, guys. A thanks to all (especially Davidy). I dual-booted into windows and got tagscanner working, it seems to work like a charm with VLC (even though windows media player displays no artwork whatsoever - but that's probably a problem with wmp, and VLC is of more value in my opinion, so good stuff...)

TagScanner is the dogs***** for tagging. Too bad it's windows only.

I thought about mass-adding album art to all of my music, but I didn't like to think about how it would increase the size of my music folder by 1.5x. lol

As to ID3 tags, I already add them in manually for every song I add to my collection.

I used foobar in windows to convert all my flac files long ago. The best when in windows btw. I don't bother with tags at all anymore. As long as it is organized how I like on my drive and the software displays exactly that, that's all I care about.
Deadbeef in linux with the file browser plugins, and foobar in windows. Tagscanner itself was always the 1st thing to do with any new files. It helps with naming and formatting so it's not a hot mess.

Hey, guys. Major update - and I hope it will serve well everyone who has the same problem.

I was still experiencing problems even with tagscanner.

I thought of the problem and turned out to be correct - every song I composed, I edited the tag album as "single" - that's why VLC kept associating all my tracks and displaying the same pic - because "single" is an album title, in its opinion. When I removed "single" from the "album" section of the tracks' tags, VLC started displaying all individual tracks' album art properly - because it no longer associated the tracks belonging to the "same album" ("single").

And yeah, TagScanner ftw (even though the album art still doesn't display in Clementine, but it doesn't either with any other software that I tried that I can specifically remember).

@ OP: Hi, maybe you can try with Easytag or Exfalso to see if you get any luck, hope this helps, cheers!

DeadBeef will edit tags just fine btw. Select what you want and just right-click "track properties". It's also portable. You just need the file browser plugin pointed to the folder.

Thanks, guys! I'll try them out sometime

I use Picard personally.