The question:
YouTube music listeners, would you prefer to have MB cover art for all your listens, or continue to use the YouTube thumbnail:
The reason:
I created ticket LB-1477 because I was seeing a “no image” YouTube thumbnail, and wanted it to fallback to the MB cover instead.
@mr_monkey has let me know that unfortunately the “no image” thumbnail is not delivered with any special metadata - in other words, we cannot just replace the “no image” thumbnails, we would have to replace all YouTube thumbnails with the MusicBrainz cover art, if available.
Personally, I have always thought the YT thumbnails are ugly as heck, but monkey raises one good point: “[YT thumbnails] more closely represents the listen in question, especially in cases where the mapping is wrong.”
4 Likes
I would keep it for unlinked listens, but change it if the album got a cover art.
I don’t really see what the advantage for this is. You’re most likely to overlook a listen that have the correct thumbnail and wrong title, even more when its similar.
But that is something that would be most suited for a tool that find suspiciously mapped listens and show them to the user for review.
5 Likes
My opinion would also be to show the MB cover art if the listen is mapped.
Of course if a listen is not matched we can’t do that, and in that case we have access to the YT thumbnail as a fallback.
I think that’s the same thing RustyNova suggests.
To be clear this was also my suggestion on the ticket, and I just formalized it a bit more for clarity:
- If the listen has recording/release MBID information (user-sent or auto-mapping), use the cover art from MusicBrainz.
- If there is no cover art at all to be found (we have a decent mechanism to max our chances), fallback to using the YT thumbnail
- If the YT listen is not mapped in any way, load the thumbnail from YT as a backup
That plan is very, very easy to implement, it’s just moving a block of code under another one, changing the fallback direction basically.
There is also a secondary question regarding if the YT thumbnail is unavailable, we get a shitty placeholder instead. But if we implement the plan above I think this will end up being few and far between, and at that point we can only substitute it for our own placeholder image 
10 Likes
I don’t mind this too much, since the user has a pathway to correct it, which is to link it to a MB release with cover art (win:win)
1 Like
OK, I reckon I can take these 10 likes as an approval of the plan 
1 Like
Yup. Although Discourse does have a poll feature for that
1 Like
I should note that in several cases, I have added Youtube video releases as “singles” to MusicBrainz, with the youtube thumbnail as cover art. So if listens of those tracks are correctly mapped, they will end up showing the youtube thumbnail either way.
I really would like to see the ListenBrainz UI handle non-square cover art better tho. I’ve had some really poorly cropped tall or wide cover art show up in my listens. Improving that would go a ways towards making youtube thumbnails look better on the site.
e.g. here, where the top and bottom of a tall image are cropped in an unfortunate way:
1 Like
I’m curious to know what you mean, but I think it should be a different ticket/thread
