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The SlimServer can display artwork associated with each album. This "cover art" is typically a copy of the CD/album's cover.

Artwork is displayed in several places within the SlimServer Web interface. The details of the display vary depending on the skin currently being used. The "Default", "Fishbone," and "Moser" skins have browse by cover art functions, clicking on a picture of the CD/album will select the album for playing or processing. The "Fishbone" skin also displays the cover art in the status display as the songs are played.

#### What is Artwork, how does the SlimServer use it?

Artwork is cover art from CD albums. It is displayed both to beautify the SlimServer interface, and in the "Browse by artwork" section to specify which albums are selected for playing or processing.

#### How do I get cover art?

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

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 http://www.slimdevices.com/dev_third_party.html for more information.

#### Graphic file requirements

The SlimServer will display any graphic file that your browser can support. Nearly all browsers support .GIF and .JPG files, so most SlimDevices customers use one of these file formats.

##### Image sizes

The image files should be modest in size, as they are sized to fit on the HTML browser window. There is no reason to have images larger than 300x300 pixels, they won't be displayed with that size, and it simply takes up space and bandwidth.

There are two file sizes in use in the current skins. One image is used when you select tracks from an album, the image size should be about 300x300 pixels. A second image is used as a "thumbnail" in the browse-by-coverart, and is displayed in the status pane of the Fishbone skin. This image should be no larger than 100x100.

#### Technical details

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

- Search in the current music directory for (in order):
  1. cover.jpg, cover.gif,
  2. folder.jpg, folder.gif,
  3. album.jpg, album.gif,
  4. thumb.jpg, thumb.gif,
  5. albumartsmall.jpg, albumartsmall.gif

The SlimServer will use the first image file located in this search. For the smaller, thumbnail image, a similar search is performed, except that the list is reversed, searching for thumb first. Specifically:

- Search in the current music directory for (in order):
  1. thumb.jpg, thumb.gif,
  2. albumartsmall.jpg, albumartsmall.gif,
  3. cover.jpg, cover.gif,
  4. album.jpg, album.gif,
  5. folder.jpg, folder.gif

Slimserver looks in the same path as the song, thus you would be looking for the same artfile in this case. However there is an option in Server Settings, Additional, Interface for setting filenames for Artwork, Artwork Thumbnail, and for setting a central location for artwork files. You can enter a specific filename if you use something not found in the list (eg, artwork.jpg). You may also create 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. The extension can be specified for any slimserver supported format, .jpg is assumed if no extension is given.

Available data elements are:

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
  Alumn 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
SHORTDATEi
  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 SlimServer.

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 and Artwork Thumbnail. In the Thumbnail selection, the Server reverses the search list so that thumb is found before cover. This way, you can have a set of large images and a set of small ones.

Browse by artwork and status BOTH scale the same image file found for Thumb. By default, the browse by artwork contrains to 100x100, while the status contrains to 100 leaving aspect ratio intact.

##### Memory usage for Artwork

Artwork for large song libraries places a significant memory load on the slimserver. There are references to the cover art kept in memory of the SlimServer for each song. This can add up fairly quickly.

The SlimServer stores, in memory, the path where the artwork can be found for each song. Long path names and many songs can cause the SlimServer to use more memory than is phycially installed on the server. This can have any of a number of impacts, from slow performance to complete failure of the SlimServer to run. The raw artwork file is read on demand, so artwork file size has no impact on the SlimServer itself.

You can turn off the artwork scan completely to save memory usage. Its in Server Settings, additional, performance.

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