Uniti Core stopped saving new album artwork

All of a sudden, album covers from new downloads are not displaying in the Naim App. Is there a limit to what the Core can digest? Or what the App can display? Everything that has been saved previously is still being displayed properly.
Would welcome any advice.
Thanks.

I left out an important fact. This problem began AFTER I installed firmware upgrade 2.5.4. Until this point, I’ve never had any issues with album artwork, and I have many thousands of rips and downloads.
Thanks, in advance for help and advice.

I don’t think there is a limit to what either the Core or the app can display, but if you have a very high number of rips and downloads, you may have found one. How many TB of files do you have?

Have you tried restarting the app, or even deleting and reinstalling the app? Is it IOS or Android that you are using?

Regarding the recent downloads, were these from the same sources you used successfully before or was it a new download source? I have not had much success with relying on metadata to give me the artwork and usually I add a cover art file to the download music folder following instructions in the on line manual. Basically you need a jpg file of the artwork, with the name folder.jpg, and the artwork needs to be no larger than 1000x1000 pixels.

I have been running the beta of 2.5.4 for months and didn’t run into any new problems with cover art images.

Hi David:

Thanks for getting back to me. I have approximately 5.5 TB of music, split about 50-50 between rips and downloads. (But the downloads are growing in comparison, since I’m largely done with ripping my collection.)

I have been using the same process for downloads ever since the Core was purchased. Every download has a folder.jpg (or folder.png) image in the respective folder.

Since I noticed this behavior, about 24 hours ago, I’ve restarted/rebooted the Core several times. And restarted the app. I will reinstall the app too.

I realize that others have had episodic problems with album artwork disappearing. I’ve been fortunate never to have an issue…until I did the 2.5.4 firmware upgrade. It’s been rock solid for 3 years.

You have tried pretty well everything then. The only other suggestion I have is to restart your router and then restart the Core and your phone again once the router is fully on line. Occasionally you can get odd failures of one or another service in the router and the phone can live on its cached copies of the artwork for old downloads etc.

OK. I’ll give that a try too. Is there any value in doing an image cache clearing or rebuilding the database? Both of which frighten me a bit; I don’t want to make matters worse. In other posts, you’ve suggested a full reset. Are that a worthy option? Again, not wanting to do harm.

Clearing the image cache in the app makes the app go and get all the images again. It depends why you aren’t seeing the new images, but if you delete and reinstall the app, you clear the cache at the same time.

Rebuilding the database wouldn’t be likely to help I suspect. It would take quite a while for 5 TB of files. I think an hour or so, maybe a bit longer.

You could do a factory reset of the Core, but I’m not sure it’s needed. It wouldn’t do any harm, but you will trigger a rebuild of the database and that will take a while as I said above.

Incidentally there should be no problem with your music store size and the ratio of downloads to rips makes no difference.

Thank you. This is all very helpful. When I get home this evening I will delete and reinstall the app.

Just as a sanity check, I just downloaded four new albums, adjusted the artwork as per Naim instructions and copied them from my PC to my Core which is on the latest firmware. All the artwork is fine in the Naim app on my iPhone 12 Pro.

Good luck!

Thanks for this. Really appreciate your doing that. I’ll work on this some more in the evening.

Still trying to figure out why artwork for new rips and downloads have stopped appearing in the app and on the screen of my ND555. I have tried rebooting everything in the chain and reinstalling the app.

At first I thought this was related to the 2.5.4 upgrade. Then I noticed that this started happening after I crossed 5500 albums. Could there be a limit on the number of pieces of album artwork that is displayed? I’m up to 5509 individual albums, and the last nine aren’t showing any artwork, even though their respective folders have the appropriate artwork files.

Have filed a ticket.

As I said before, I never heard of a limit to the number of albums. You could check if you wanted by deleting a couple of rips you don’t ever listen to and see whether that lets a couple of your new downloads to come through.

Thanks for that suggestion. I tried deleting one rip and a couple of downloads. Didn’t make a difference. App continues to show artwork from albums that I uploaded into the Core before Saturday…and fails to show artwork from newer ones.

Truly stumped. I’ve filed a ticket with support.

How old are the albums you are ripping?

If they’re brand new or relatively obscure releases, the metadata is not always available immediately.

It’s downloads he is talking about and he’s adding the artwork the same way he always has done….

Yes. What David says is accurate. These are new downloads with artwork that I have included as “folder.jpg” (as I have done with a few thousand downloads before them). I use a PC to transfer them into the Downloads folder of the Naim Store on a QNAP NAS drive.

I’ve encountered the same issue with rips of a handful of new CDs. I can tell by examining the folders in Naim Store that the original album artwork is indeed embedded in the appropriate folders. But the images are not showing up in the App.

I don’t think you have said whether you are using the Naim app for Android or for Apple IOS?

In either case, can you try the app on another phone or tablet? Borrow one or invite a friend round for a coffee or something if necessary. Ideally try the other type of App. The Naim app for Android does sometimes show up issues that are rooted in the Android implementation being different in different manufacturer’s devices.

In general the IOS app is more stable than the Android one, but this problem isn’t general of course!

Hi David. I very much appreciate the feedback. Thank you! I have 2 iOS devices; both are relatively new. I’ve deleted and reinstalled the Naim app in both; the results are identical. I don’t think anyone in the household use Android devices, but I’ll see if I can somehow lay my hands on one.

This is such a maddening puzzle. I just received a box set of CDs that I ordered a couple of weeks ago. Last night I ripped them into the Core. No issue with the music, and Rovi captured all the metadata, but no images showed up. (I also tried to upload alternative covers for those discs. No luck.)

Again…thanks.

Can you try to transcode one album in Flac and see what happens ?

Did you try a factory reset of the Core?

You do that by turning the Core off, pull out the power lead or turn off at the wall switch, then wait half a minute or so. Then keep holding in the front panel button and turn the power on again at the wall (or plug the power lead in again). Keep holding the front panel button in until the little led next to the front panel USB flashes once, then let go the front panel button and let it finish starting up.

Once you can see the Core in the Naim app again, you need to set the Music Store back to be your internal hard disc. I think it will say something like “Music Store detected. Do you want to make it active?” And you answer yes. If it doesn’t offer you that message then set up the Music Store via the cog wheel icon and the Manage Music option in the drop down. Don’t agree to format the hard disc though!

After that it should automatically reindex the music collection. If you look at the bottom of the list of albums in the Album listing you should see the number of albums it has indexed and that will slowly increase (in jumps, not album by album). It takes quite a time to do. It’s a while since I did it but I think it will be some hours for your number of albums.

You could leave it to do it overnight, although I always find there is a certain fascination in watching these things slowly increment!