This one is pretty flukey, so hopefully you'll be able to help. I gun Gmusicbrowser on my main, Ubuntu machine, and everything works fine. I also run it on my Pinephone, which runs Mobian, a Debian distro. It works fine here, too, except often times my album art doesn't load. It will load fine on my desktop and laptop, but I won't see anything on the phone.

When I go to edit the tags for a song with missing artwork, it'll say 'unknown' under embedded pictures. If I go to advanced, and down to picture, it'll just say 'error' where the thumbnail should be.

I have tried to isolate image size as the problem, the presence or absence of ID3v1 tags, or anything else I could possibly think of. I can't find any reason why these covers won't load. They're all jpg, and I'm running 1.99 on all devices.

Any thoughts how I might be able to get the album art loading on Mobian? I can give you more details if needed. Thanks.

I realized this same problem was happening on my other desktop computer, and I finally figured it out: the deb linked from the gmusicbrowser website, gmusicbrowser_1.1.99.1_all.deb, installs this version: gmusicbrowser_1.1.99.1+1514; when I add the nightly PPA, it installs gmusicbrowser_1.1.99.1+1516. This newer version causes a lot of my cover art not to load. I have no idea why.

After downgrading gmusicbrowser on my device, I now see all the album covers, which is great. However, now, half the covers won't load on the lock screen, or the pulldown menu. So there's something going wrong with MPRIS.

I also noticed that on deskop, the 'now playing' cover is wrong no matter what version of gmusicbrowser I'm usung. I can even look in the gmusicbrowser config directory and see that the 'now playing' mpris jpeg is correct, but the indicator stays stuck on the first song that was playing when the program started. On my phone, it does change, but it's just  missing image thumbnail half the time.

Alright, I fixed the mpris problem. Here's how:

  • Install gmusicbrowser_1.1.99.1+1516;
  • Go to /usr/share/gmusicbrowser/plugins, and copy mpris2.pm into a temp directory;
  • Downgrade to gmusicbrowser_1.1.99.1+1514;
  • copy mpris2.pm from your temp directory into /usr/share/gmusicbrowser/plugins, overwriting the version that's there.

Now, I have all my covers showing, and they show in the indicator (so on my phone, the lock screen and pull down menu).