Help / Troubleshooting
Artwork I fetched vanishes after a rescan
You pressed Online on the Missing artwork card in Library Health, covers filled in across the albums that had none, and a rescan later the count climbed straight back up. This was a real bug with a real fix.
The short answer
Update to the current version. The wipe is fixed. The upgrade cannot bring back covers an older build already cleared, so press Online once more for those, and this time they stay. New versions install by running the current installer over the one you have. See Updating Vesari Stylus.
What was actually going wrong
A folder cover and a cover fetched from the internet used to be recorded the same way: as a path to an image file. For a folder cover that is right, so when a rescan finds no cover image in the folder it clears the stored path. Deleting cover.jpg really should make that cover go away.
A fetched cover is not in your album folder. It is downloaded into the app's own data folder, which no scan of your music ever walks. So every rescan of those tracks reached the same conclusion: no cover image here, clear the path. Meanwhile the cached copy often still drew on screen, which is why the symptom looked so odd: covers you could plainly see beside a count insisting they were missing.
It did not take a deliberate Rescan Library, either. Local library folders are watched while the app is open, and a change inside one re-indexes that folder, so dropping one new album in could wipe the fetched covers of everything else there. A network share is not watched, so on a NAS it did. See How scanning works: first scan, rescan and watch folders.
The fix
Each stored cover now carries a note of where it came from: an image file found on your own disk, or one the app fetched.
- A folder cover is still cleared when its image file is gone. Deleting
cover.jpgremoves that cover, exactly as before. - A fetched cover is kept through a rescan, because no folder scan could ever rediscover it.
- Drop a real cover file into the album folder later and it takes over, behaving like any folder cover from then on.
The upgrade also runs a one-time repair: every fetched cover your library still holds is marked as fetched on first launch, so the first rescan afterwards does not wipe those either. Covers already blanked cannot come back, because the record of them was what got cleared.
If artwork still disappears
A few other things genuinely remove a cover, and all of them are intended.
- The image file moved, was renamed or was deleted. A folder cover is a pointer to a file, so a tidy-up that renamed
cover.jpgto something the scan does not recognise clears the pointer on the next rescan. Rename it back tocover,folderorfrontwith a.jpg,.jpegor.pngextension, then press Search art. - The folder is offline. If the album sits on a NAS or an external drive that is asleep, the cover image cannot be read, so the app falls back to whatever is embedded in the track, which may be nothing. Wake the drive and it returns. See Tags and paths on a NAS.
- One image file, several albums in one folder. A cover file is used only for the album that clearly owns the folder, so mistagged strays sharing it do not take that album's cover. Fixing the tags sorts it. See An album shows as incomplete, or split into duplicates.
- The cover is enormous or cannot be decoded. The track imports normally, but the image is dropped rather than cached, the album falls back to a placeholder, and it is listed under Cover art too large / undecodable. Replace it with an ordinary sized JPEG or PNG.
The durable fix: put the art where nothing can clear it
A fetched cover survives rescans now, but it lives in the app's data folder rather than in your music, so wiping that data takes it with it. Two ways to make a cover permanent:
- Embed it into the files. Open the album in the tag editor and use the Album Art panel: with one track selected the button reads Choose Image, with several it reads Set Art for All Selected, and Search online beside it does the same job from a web result. The picture goes into the audio files themselves, so it travels with them to any player and no scan can clear it. A CUE-sheet track and a few untaggable formats are the exceptions.
- Save a cover image into the album folder. Name it
cover.jpg,folder.jpgorfront.jpgand every scan finds it.
A CD ripped in Vesari Stylus already does both. See Rip a CD to your library and Cover art: where it comes from and how to fix it.
Still losing covers
If artwork disappears on a current version and nothing above fits, report it. Use the in-app Report a Bug form and say which album, whether that cover came from a folder file or the Online button, and what you did just before it went. See Is this a bug? How to report it.