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The Squeezebox Server 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 Squeezebox software. 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 "Default" and "Fishbone" skins also display the cover art in the status display as the songs are played.

#### What is Artwork, how does the Squeezebox software use it?

Artwork is cover art from CD albums. It is displayed both to beautify the Squeezebox interface, and in the "Browse by album" 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 Squeezebox 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.

#### Technical details

For each place in the skin that references a large cover art image, the Squeezebox 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 Squeezebox Server will use the first image file located in this search.

Squeezebox Server 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, Advanced, Formatting 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 Squeezebox Server 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
  Album 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 Squeezebox Server.

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.

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 constrains to 100 leaving aspect ratio intact.

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