Album Art Downloader XUI, A tool for downloading cover art Options

[AlexVallat]

OK, chartstats.boo is up. As it turns out, they can do thumbnails, it just isn't advertised. Of course, that might mean it gets turned off without notice, but that's the way it goes. Their search algorithm seems pretty loose, so I'd recommend setting the max results for this one quite low, otherwise you'll get a load of less relevant results too.

Alex

[pianoinbush]

wow, you're fast! amazing! thanks a lot if I knew you're so eager to communicate, I'd write here months ago.

regarding 45cat.com, well, I, for one, don't just get covers for my mp3 collection. for example, I'm currently building a collection of covers for UK chart singles (hence the accent on chartstats as well). but, of course, given that there'll be little interest in it, I understand why you are reluctant to work with it.

thanks!

[leland]

I have a fairly large library (few hundred GB) and am getting this error while using the foobar browser: "Error occurred while reading media library: Insufficient memory to continue execution of the program."

Additionally I'm only coming up with art named "folder", so it might be dying before it can do additional passes to check for alternate names (if that's the way it's coded). I have a lot named cover so I know it should be picking those up.

Any helpful hints so I can continue to use this for large batches?

Thanks!

[AlexVallat]

Any helpful hints so I can continue to use this for large batches?

OK, a few hundred GB is a little beyond the scope of my test data set! :-)

Firstly, the behaviour with the art finding isn't at issue. It only finds one art file for each album, once it's found one, it stops looking for that album. It does one album at a time, rather than first looking for all named Folder, then for all named Cover, so if you have albums which just have Cover and no Folder, it simply hadn't reached one before it died.

I'm actually quite surprised it ran out of memory when listing albums. Other than the UI, it should be storing very little information in memory at this point; just the album and artist name, and the folder path for each album. It's possible there's a leak, although I haven't been able to find one yet. With WPF, it's usually image handling that's at fault - in this case, it would be loading up the images to determine their dimensions. As an experiment, could you try clearing the "Specify path to find images" box, or setting it to something you know won't match? If you don't get the out of memory error then at least I'll know where the problem is, and might even be able to find a workaround to force WPF to release whatever it's hanging on to.

As far as helpful hints go, would you consider splitting it into smaller batches? If you use foobar to create playlists containing subsets of your albums (say A-M, N-Z for example) then use those rather than "Entire Library" in the foobar browser, it would help. I don't know what the limitations are, so I can't really give you any concrete information on how many subsets you'd need to split it into, though. I'd at least try the simple split into two halves, you might get lucky.

Alex

[skullmonkey]

Can this process be little bit automated? I don't want to click download on every single album.

Thanks,
S@

[AlexVallat]

Can this process be little bit automated?

Yes. Automatic Image Downloading

Alex

[skullmonkey]

*DELETE POST*

This post has been edited by skullmonkey: Apr 5 2011, 09:31

[skullmonkey]

Search from FOLDER and not filename?
Lets say my folder is AAA - BBB. Any way to search the WEB searching fo AAA as Artist and BBB as Album?
I need this since there are various artist with different Artist names also some mp3s have empty tags.

Thanks,
S@

[AlexVallat]

Search from FOLDER and not filename?

Yes, that's possible: File Browser. If your folder is "AAA - BBB" where AAA is the artist and BBB is the album, then the pattern you want is: "\%artist% - %album%\."

Alex

[godrick]

Alex, regarding my efforts to automatically save images per posts 1564 though 1570, I finally also got your recommended method to work. I found out I had to close the program after making the location change in "specifiy path to save images" in the search window to ensure that this new location was saved to the user.config file. Even after reinstalling the application, I noticed that changes to the location I entered were not written to user.config until I closed the application.

If you can also see this behavior, I suggest either adding a "apply configuration" button to prevent the need to close and reopen for changes like this to stick. I know other config changes have immediate effect without closing and reopening, but this save location does not seem to currently work that way. thanks

This post has been edited by godrick: Apr 13 2011, 15:35

[AlexVallat]

Thank you for your comments. Application settings are only persisted to the user.config file on exit, but unless the application crashes out, this won't ever be noticed. Settings are changed (in memory) when a window closes, or is opened. So, if you have a window open, make some changes, and open a new window, that new window will have the settings as set on the existing one. If you have two windows open, make changes in window A, then switch to window B (and possibly make other changes there), then opening a new window C from window B will mean that window B's settings are kept, and applied to C. A will remain unchanged.

The three simple rules are: 1) No existing window will have its settings changed by any other window. 2) Any new window will have the same settings as the one that launched it. 3) Closing a window also saves any changes made to its settings.

So, there is no need for an Apply Settings button. The settings of the current window are always applied to any windows opened from it.

Alex

[DRata]

The Buy.com script stopped working recently. I fixed it by making minor changes to the regex in the script, and by adding a clause to omit "All Categories" results, which were causing duplicates to appear. I also had to edit the clause that eliminated "Similar Products in general" results. Here's the diff from version 0.5:

CODE

27a28,32
> //Remove "Results ... in All Categories"
> allCategories = searchResultsHtml.IndexOf("> in all categories <")
> if(allCategories > -1):
> searchResultsHtml = searchResultsHtml.Substring(0, allCategories)
>
29c34
< similar = searchResultsHtml.IndexOf(">Similar Products in general<")
---
> similar = searchResultsHtml.IndexOf(">Similar Products in <span class=\"searchHeaderTerm\">general<")
34c39
< itemsRegex = Regex("<tr><td valign=\"top\" class=\"(list|listTop)\"><a href=\"(?<productPageUrl>[^\"]*/(?<sku>[^\"]*)\\.html)\"[^>]*><img[^>]*title=\"(?<title>[^\"]*)\"[^>]*src=\"(?<thumbnailUrl>[^\"]*)\"[^>]")
---
> itemsRegex = Regex("<tr><td valign=\"top\" class=\"searchList\"[^>]*><a href=\"(?<productPageUrl>[^\"]*/(?<sku>[^\"]*)\\.html)\"[^>]*><img[^>]*src=\"(?<thumbnailUrl>[^\"]*)\"[^>]*title=\"(?<title>[^\"]*)\"[^>]")

I suppose the version number should get bumped up to 0.6 or something, but I'll leave that up to the author.

(Note: edited to add fix for omitting "Similar Products in general" results.)

This post has been edited by DRata: Apr 22 2011, 19:44

[DRata]

The arkivmusik script also needed a minor tweak. Not that arkivmusik has great images to offer, but anyway...

CODE

18c18
< searchResultsHtml as string = GetPage("http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/NameList?searching=1&role_wanted=0&search_term="+EncodeUrl(artist + " " + album))
---
> searchResultsHtml as string = GetPage("http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/NameList?searching=1&searchingPage=ABC123&role_wanted=0&search_term=" + EncodeUrl(artist + " " + album))

[AlexVallat]

Thanks for those script updates, that's great work! I've published the changes through the online updates system.

Arkivmusic does produce very small covers, it's true, but it's the only source I've got for classical music at the moment.

Alex

[Qest]

Just wanted to say that I've found this program useful for finding one-off album covers.

The file browser would be very useful to me if %album artist% was used instead of %artist%. I understand from reading this thread that album artist is far from standard, but having it available as a non-default option would be nice for us foobar users.

Thanks for all the effort,
Qest

[AlexVallat]

The file browser would be very useful to me if %album artist% was used instead of %artist%. I understand from reading this thread that album artist is far from standard, but having it available as a non-default option would be nice for us foobar users.

Thanks for the comments. If you are a foobar user, you can use the foobar browser, which does use the %album artist% field. Foobar already has an entire browser as a special case, I don't think it needs an additional special case option in the file browser too.

Alex

[foohat]

Love this program! Great work!

I'm having one problem. I'd like to be able to download artist art for my whole collection, using only last.fm artist server. Ideally, I'd like to be able to save the file as %name%.%extension% in the respective artists main folder in my music library. However, every time I run Album Art Downloader using foobar browser or file browser, it always wants to name it "folder.%extension%". I can see where to change this in the main window of the program, but as soon as i switch to file browser or foobar browser these options disappear. once in foobar or file browser I could change the filenames manually, but that would take far too long.

anyone know how to fix this?

best,

[foohat]

Love this program! Great work!

I'm having one problem. I'd like to be able to download artist art for my whole collection, using only last.fm artist server. Ideally, I'd like to be able to save the file as %name%.%extension% in the respective artists main folder in my music library. However, every time I run Album Art Downloader using foobar browser or file browser, it always wants to name it "folder.%extension%". I can see where to change this in the main window of the program, but as soon as i switch to file browser or foobar browser these options disappear. once in foobar or file browser I could change the filenames manually, but that would take far too long.

anyone know how to fix this?

best,

nevermind, think i got it!

[homebunny]

Thanks for this wonderfull program!

How can i embed the downloaded the art in my MP3?
Is this something that 'Album Art Downloader XUI' could do?

Thanks

[Cokemonkey11]

Sorry I've not read through all 64 pages. Is there a version that works in Linux? Do you have plans to make one?

[AlexVallat]

Is there a version that works in Linux? Do you have plans to make one?

Not officially, although I believe the command line version (aad.exe) can be run using mono. The main application UI is written in WPF, and at the moment mono have no plans to implement support for WPF on Linux. I certainly have no plans to re-write the Album Art Downloader using a different UI library, so I'd say the chances of a Linux version appearing are quite slim.

Alex

[DRata]

Thanks for this wonderfull program!

How can i embed the downloaded the art in my MP3?
Is this something that 'Album Art Downloader XUI' could do?

Thanks

AFAIK, Album Art Downloader can't embed images in MP3s yet, but there are several other programs that can do this. One of the better ones out there for Windows is MP3Tag, which makes it fairly simple: you select the MP3 file, go to View > Extended Tags... (Alt+T), click "Add Cover..." and select the file(s) containing the artwork.

If you have a whole album of MP3s in a single folder, you can copy the artwork to the folder, and some players will recognize the artwork and display it while the songs in that folder are playing.

[pianoinbush]

hey. sorry if this has been discussed before, but where does the AAD store the big preview images? I can't seem to find them anywhere and I believe they're starting to clog space.
thanks in advance.

[AlexVallat]

where does the AAD store the big preview images?

AAD only saves images if you tell it to, either by saving a specific result, or by using the automatic downloader to find and automatically save art for many albums.

The preview images which are displayed as search results are not saved to disk at all, and will not be clogging up space. They might clog up memory if you have enough of them, and not a lot of memory, but they are all discarded when you close the search window.

Alex

[Zarggg]

Just to clarify Alex's post, they preview images are stored directly in RAM space.