[music-app]+ [dash] Inconsistent artwork between scope and app

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄]

I have only one Bruno Mars and one Daft Punk album on my device.
In the Music Scope initial view they show with one set of artwork.
In the Music app and the expanded Music Scope they show different artwork.

Should these not be consistent?

Scope:- http://imgur.com/yKR0hof
Scope, expanded:- http://imgur.com/GqtRI5a
Further example:- http://imgur.com/cL3E0Ni

I don't have a screenshot from the Music App, but it shows the same as the scope expanded view.

[Victor Thompson (vthompson)]

The artwork you see in the first image (Scope) is the "artist artwork". This is an image that doesn't identify a specific album, but the artist. Typically this is a group photo of the "band"--which is more or less what you see for Bruno Mars and Daft Punk. What you see in the second image (Scope, expanded) and the Music app are the actual _album_ cover arts.

I don't think there's an inconsistency here. However, the design team should consider using the "artist artwork" in the Music app in the Artists tab. One reason not to do so is that the "artist artwork" seems to be empty or of poor quality more often tat the album cover art images.

[Jouni Helminen (jounihelminen)]

We are using artist images on the Artist tab in the music app now, I believe?

Perhaps we could have a fallback of showing the cover art rather than nothing for those artists where our API returns nothing

[Michi Henning (michihenning)]

Showing something is better than showing nothing. But, please, do *not* issue two requests (one for artist only, and one for artist with an album). Instead, try one first and *only* if the first one fails, issue the second request. Otherwise, for artists where the service provides a stand-alone artist image as well as an album image, we'll needlessly end up with two thumbnails in the cache, where a single thumbnail would be enough.

Note that waiting for the first request to fail before issuing the second request is OK because that incurs a delay only while the cache is cold (and failure notices come back much quicker from the server than successful ones). Once the cache is warmed up, the delay for sending two requests will be unnoticeable.

[Michi Henning (michihenning)]

Talking about this with Pawel, this really should be addressed in the remote server. If it gets a request for artist art with both artist and album, and that request returns a lookup failure, it could try again without the album. (Apparently, there are cases where 7digital returns failure for both artist and album, but finds an image if only the artist is provided.)

[Michi Henning (michihenning)]

I have just confirmed with Facundo that the server does this transparently. In other words, if the application sends artist+album and 7digital returns a failure for this, then the server automatically tries again with just the artist.

So, if the application does this too, we are just wasting resources. The correct behavior appears to be to always send artist+album. If that doesn't return artwork, neither will artist+<empty>.