Makes No Sense At All

I often get questions regarding (missing) cover art in MPoD and MPaD. In this post I will explain what you can expect.


The apps have 2 methods of retrieving cover art. First they attempt to load the cover art from a web server, that is, if you have specified on in the settings for that specific connection. In order to use this method, a web server like apache needs to be running on the server that is hosting mpd, and it needs to share your entire music folder. As an example, here’s an extract from my apache configuration file:

Alias /music/ "/home/music/"

<Directory "/home/music/">

Options FollowSymLinks Indexes MultiViews

AllowOverride None

Order deny,allow

Deny from all

Allow from 192.168.1

</Directory>

This shares the music folder at http://machine-ip/music, so that address must be added in the MPoD or MPaD connection settings. Then, if you place a file named ‘Folder.jpg’ in a directory, MPoD and MPaD will use that image for all tracks in that directory. So this works well if you have organized your music per album.
If the apps can’t find a cover through this first method, they revert back to retrieving cover art from Amazon through a lookup based on artist and album name. This works often, but when there are strange characters in a title, or extra text like ‘[live disc1]‘ at the end of an album title the lookup can fail. And off course it will also fail when the music is unknown at Amazon. This may happen especially for less well known or regional music (like from the Netherlands).
Cover art that is embedded in mp3 or flac files is not accessible by the apps, because the mpd protocol currently doesn’t provide a function that pushes embedded cover art to clients.
To my knowledge, the Bryston BDP-1 doesn’t have a built-in webserver, so when using MPoD or MPaD with that player, only the 2nd, amazon based method will be used to retrieve cover art.

Since today MPoD v1.5.2 is available from the AppStore. The main change is the added ability to search directly against the mpd database from the browse window. This addition allows MPoD to work well with mopidy, which opens up the world of Spotify. Here are the release notes: Feature: Support search in browse window. Feature: Compatibility with mopidy. Feature: Support for remote control functions in iOS4 for on-the-go mode. Bugfix: Improved stability when switching between connections.

This week I started testing with mopidy, a mpd-compliant server that lets you play music from Spotify. I’ve been working with Stein Magnus Jodal, the developer, to remove some of the rough edges, and it’s coming along nicely. A new release should be available in the coming weeks.

Unfortunately 2 serious issues with MPoD v1.5 were not been during my testing, and as a result some people saw the application crashing when activating the artist tab, the album tab, or when changing between connections. The fix for this problem is now available from the AppStore.