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What is Artwork?

Artwork is cover art from CD albums and typically a copy of the CD/album's cover. The Logitech Media Server can display artwork associated with each album.

How does the Squeezebox software use it?

Artwork is displayed in several places within the Squeezebox software. When you import (scan) your library - the scanner uses the first picture for all other media files found in that folder. So you should use one folder for each album.

Where should I store the cover art?

How do I get cover art?

Many sites that sell CDs include cover art in their catalog. With most browsers, you can right click on the image and select "Save image as..."

Useful plugins

Several third party developers have written utilities to automatically retreive cover art based on the internal tags of your MP3, Ogg, Flac, or other files. See 3rd-Party-Software for more information.

Find albums with small /missing artwork used in your library:

The Music Artist Info plugin can support you to find albums with no or small artwork. If you enabled this plugin before a scan/rescan - it supports you with some additional Information under the extras in the main menue.

Artwork file requirements

The Squeezebox supports .GIF .PNG and .JPG files.

Image sizes

The image files should be modest in size, as they are sized to fit on the HTML browser window or the device's display. A good size nowadays is a maximum of about 1500x1500. This should display reasonably well even on high resolution displays. Please keep in mind that the larger the file is, the longer it will take to process.

Technical details

For each place in the skin that references a cover art image, the Squeezebox software performs the following search:

Search in the current music directory for (in order):

The Logitech Media Server will use the first image file located in this search.

Filenames based on song variables

If your first character is %, the server then parses the rest of the string as an InfoFormat, the same as title format is created. As an example, you could create a single directory of songs and name all your artwork as artist-album.jpg. For this, enter a setting of

  %ARTIST-ALBUM.jpg

for Artwork or Artwork Thumbnail in the server settings section.

Available data elements are:

Setting Description
CT content type
TITLE Song title
GENRE Song genre
TRACKNUM tracknumber as an integer
FS file size as reported by the underlying Operating System.
ARTIST Artist for pop music, sometimes conductor for classical works.
ALBUM Album name
COMMENT Often the encoder used to create the MP3/FLAC/AAC/... file.
YEAR Year published or released.
SECS total song length in seconds
DURATION (minutes and seconds)
VBR_SCALE vbr/cbr
BITRATE encoded bit rate
VOLUME volume name
PATH Path to the song
FILE main file name of song
EXT file extension of song (Type in Microsoft systems)
LONGDATE current date, long
SHORTDATE current date, short
CURRTIME current time.

Elements can be separated by anything (or nothing). The separators are only used if the data elements are present.

The above list is included for completeness, it is unlikely that anyone would actually want to have differing artwork files for songs of different bitrates, but the ability is in the Logitech Media Server.

Artwork internal to the ID3 tags within a song takes precedence, followed by any specified filename in the server settings. If an Artwork Folder setting is used (in Server Settings, Additional, Interface) then that folder is searched first for any file matching those given for Artwork.

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