'Recent' and 'Most Used' sections do not display thumbnails

[Carl Ansell]

Under the music category, the lens does not show the album art associated with any of the files. The album art is present as it is displayed in banshee.

[Mark Tully (markjtully)]

Version 0.1-0~16~natty1 is now in the PPA, and hopefully it solves this problem. Can you try it out and see if the album art shows up? You'll need to log out and back in again after updating for the update to take effect.

I've changed it to query Banshee's track list, that the lens gets on loading, for album art rather than trying to figure it out from the file name.

[Carl Ansell (afccarl1994)]

I have downloaded the update, but the issue is still present. However, instead of showing no icon, it now shows a standard icon for all of the tracks. So it seems that it is now recognising that there should be an image there.

If you need any more information from me, I'll be happy to help.

[Mark Tully (markjtully)]

Strange. But at least there is progress!

I'm puzzled by why the extension appears to be showing up file names rather than track titles. It's as if the uri of the item can't be found in Banshee's database. But it should then just show the full uri rather than just the file's name & extension.

A few questions:

- Which section is in the screenshot showing? The 'Recently Played', 'Most Popular' or 'All Music' section?

- Where is your Banshee database file located? Any your music, for that matter. Is it on a separate drive or partition or anything

- What information does Zeitgeist's Activity Manager (available from Software centre) show for songs played. From Banshee it should show "Song Name - Artist Name - Album Name" (or something like that) rather than "File Name", for example.

- Any unusual naming conventions in your music collection?

If you can think of anything else that might be useful, you could add that as well.

[Carl Ansell (afccarl1994)]

1. The screenshot is showing 'All Music', though on opening the lens this section is not there? The only section there is recently played.

2. The music is located in /home/carl/music, the default music folder. My hard drive has only one partition (other than swap), and this is where everything is saved. The music folder does not have any subfolders. However, I noticed that banshee is set to see the folder hierarchy as /artist/album, not sure if that would make difference.

3. Activity Manager shows all of the music as a file name, xxxxx.mp3. I have just messed around with one of the files, and after changing the file extension from .mp3 to .MP3, the extension does not show up in the lens.

4. All files have .mp3 as the extension (lowercase). They also just have the names of the file, no artist names or track numbers in the song titles.

5. The files had all of the metadata added on my PS3. These were then copied via USB onto my PC. They were then synced to Ubuntu One, and when I wiped my system to do a fresh install of Natty, the files were all downloaded from Ubuntu One.

Under the Activity Manager's timeline view, the files show with names such as ubuntuone:4fabd8b2-9830-47b1-b407-e38593f21d5a.

All of the album images are .jpg files.

I will try the lens on my laptop, to see if it has similar results. Maybe this issue is just that the music has come from Ubuntu One?

[Mark Tully (markjtully)]

I suppose there could be some sort of issue with Ubuntu One. I'll see if I can replicate the problem using Ubuntu One.

Regarding point 1, the 'All Music' section is not supposed to be present if there's no search active simply because it would just show the same first few songs in the collection whenever there's no search terms (which doesn't strike me as particularly useful).

Apart from the Ubuntu One stuff, nothing seems particularly strange, so hopefully it's something to do with that. Maybe you could try ripping a CD onto the computer (and not getting Ubuntu One involved with it) and see if you can make that show up in the lens? You'll need to log out and back in after updating Banshee's collection as the lens doesn't yet see changes to Banshee's database automatically. It still only reads it once at login. Oh, and please post how you get on with the laptop as well.

[Carl Ansell (afccarl1994)]

First off, I am an idiot. When I first posted the bug, I did search for songs which displayed the 'All Music' section. After the first update, I didn't do this and was just looking at the top 2 sections. After searching for a song now, all information is displayed as expected in the 'All Music' section. So that's the good news! :-)

However, the 'Recently Played' and 'Most Played' do not show the information correctly. This same behaviour is also present in the images section, so this is no longer a music issue.

I have uploaded another screenshot to show the issue, as I feel this would clarify what I have found.

P.S. Tries on my laptop, which is running Unity 2D, and the music section does not work at all. The other sections work, but don't show any thumbnails. But that's another issue, and is not important for the time being.

[Carl Ansell (afccarl1994)]

Got some new information, so I think its time for an update.

Added a few more songs to my collection since the last comment, and curiously, (only) the last song I added works correctly in both the 'recent' and 'most used' sections as well. All of my other songs still show the same behaviour as in the screenshot in the comment above.

I'm wondering if this could be a Unity issue. I read another bug report about lens daemons starting on login, but not displaying any results and having broken quicklists as well. As I don't know how this, or any other lens actually works, I could be completely wrong, but the randomness of this makes and the issues faced with other lenses makes me think that maybe that the issue is in Unity itself rather than the individual lenses.

The lens not working on my laptop should have been solved as there was a bug report in Unity 2D about this behaviour with all lenses not working, which has now been fixed, though I no longer have the laptop to check.