I uploaded 11 cover art images to http://musicbrainz.org/release/1b00bda1-3d6a-41c2-a9f7-dc0afa278b91/cover-art . That was over 3 hours ago. The cover art list has 11 empty spaces for my images, and all say, “Image not available yet, please try again in a few minutes.” Normally the thumbnails appear in just a minute or two.
Is there a way I should diagnose this? How long should I wait until I decide the upload failed? Is there a good procedure for clearing out the failed uploads and try again?
I looked in the archive and web for relevant directions. I didn’t see anything helpful.
When Internet Archive services are unavailable… talks about cover art not showing up when the Internet Archive is completely down. But cover art is appearing for other Releases I uploaded to in the same session. It sounds like a different problem.
The Internet Archive has a process where they take the uploaded image and runs it through some things (e.g., the resizings to the 250px and 500px versions). Depending on how many other things the IA’s server are doing, this “pipe” can get a bit clogged and images will sometimes take a few hours to process. It is mostly done within a minute or two, but sometimes not.
If you experience it not having changed after more than 24 hours, it is likely that process has stopped completely, in which case we need to prod their servers to reinitiate the processing, so please let us know then. A couple of hours of “backlog” is not uncommon though.
The second one is less important as it’s just a higher resolution scan of a previously available front cover, but the first one would be new to the archive.
Based on earlier comments, it might be necessary to “prod the servers” to restart processing of the cover art.
It appears that CAA is a lot slower in processing PNG files than JPG, and even worse if the files are large.
What I’ve started doing for covers that should be available quickly is uploading a relatively small (1000 x 1000 px) JPG file first, and then uploading the larger archive files behind it later. I keep a list of the releases and check back every day or two to see if the archive images have been processed. Eventually, when the 250 px and 500 px thumbnails are available, I’ll go back and re-order the images on the release and / or remove the initial (small) uploaded image.
I have been uploading PNG files at 1200 pixels in the shortest direction. Of the 46 I uploaded over the last week, all but 4 were processed almost instantly. The ones I linked earlier seem stuck. Uploading again did not help.
I think you’re right. It is likely not enough benefit for the extra work. With that in mind, I’ll go back to just uploading the “final” image and wait for CAA to process the thumbnail images whenever it happens. If people are interested, they can always view / download the original uploaded image.
That’s the standard size for album cover art uploaded to Fanart.tv, so I’m generally creating JPG files that resolution to upload there anyway.
There has been an ongoing discussion in Advice on Scanning Cover Art that seems to be advocating much higher resolutions and (preferably) PNG files for the archival images on CAA. The (unofficial) MB guideline indicating scan resolution of 300 dpi is being challenged, and there are a lot of conflicting opinions and advice. I have to admit, I’m beginning to find it all a bit tiresome.
This seems to be a widespread problem. There has been a fairly active discussion in the Picard forum, see New cover art not loading, about the same problem. In that case the following file was never created (see the start of the post for details)
It has been 15 days now since the problem occurred and the file has still not been created. Obviously something has gone wrong with the back-end software in the MusicBrainz website, which handles the cover art edits.
@Freso is there any way to restart whatever appears to have stopped and perhaps look at what is going wrong?
