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Topic: Download of cover art - where are we ? (Read 26566 times) previous topic - next topic
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Download of cover art - where are we ?

Hi folks,

Sorry if there's already a thread for this matter. I've done some searches but nothing has come.

I was wondering what's the best solution (as of TODAY) for mass-downloading of high quality cover art.

There's a lot of softwares out there (Album Cover Art Downloader, iTunes download scripts, etc.), but as far as I know, either they don't exist anymore, or they don't work anymore (e.g. iTunes download scripts, or software using Amazon since Amazon now often surrounds the jpgs with a white border, so we need to automatically crop it), or they haven't been updated since a long time.

I hope I'm wrong, so could you please give me some reliable advice ? Are there any related threads ? What are the best solutions ?

(huh ? a Freedb-like database for covers ? c'mon, you must be kidding right ?...  )

Many thanks in advance.

Jose

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #1 –
Cover art is copy-righted material, and companies have put a stop to most free software to access it. IMHO, the  best solution is AMG access with dBpoweramp. Its not free, but its good. Hopefully the next version will add a couple of new sources, with additional cover art sources.

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #2 –
+1 for AMG access, although the database isn't every single thing out there, it covers at least 95% of it. I download mine via WMP11.
EAC>1)fb2k>LAME3.99 -V 0 --vbr-new>WMP12 2)MAC-Extra High

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Jose Hidalgo on
I was wondering what's the best solution (as of TODAY) for mass-downloading of high quality cover art.

There's a lot of softwares out there (Album Cover Art Downloader, iTunes download scripts, etc.), but as far as I know, either they don't exist anymore, or they don't work anymore (e.g. iTunes download scripts, or software using Amazon since Amazon now often surrounds the jpgs with a white border, so we need to automatically crop it), or they haven't been updated since a long time.


I don't know about the solutions that others use (and I have not experienced anything that works only under Windows), but have a Python script that I wrote myself (based on some code from KDE's Amarok) and it pulls the covers from Amazon.com.

It is surprising to have this tool work so well, with so little effort. I guess that I could write things in a saner way, but it suffices for me.

Quote
(huh ? a Freedb-like database for covers ? c'mon, you must be kidding right ?...  )


Actually, if the bands wouldn't complain, I think that this could be an excellent idea. Unfortunately, I see it only as a private solution, because the covers are copyrighted work that shouldn't be distributed at large scale.

On the other hand, we do have entries in Wikipedia, Amazon and Lyricwiki.org, where one can grab artwork for some quite rare to find albums.

By the way, I think that Lyricwiki.org is really a superb place to use, particularly if your song player can show lyrics fetched from the internet.


Regards, Rogério.

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Eli on
Cover art is copy-righted material, and


No, it is not copywritten.  Content companies will attempt to make this claim (illegally), but they have not succeeded in defending copyright of album art.  Do what you will with album art, it has been safely allowed under fair use interpretations for several decades.

+Reardon

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #5 –
i use this one
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....c=51896&hl=

is not stan alone, and works great from foobar with foo_run, you just click on an album and the prog start looking cover in several servers and then it saves the cover in a specific folder. Very configurable.

they recently updated the new version
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=715370
Chaintech AV-710 Wolfson DAC - Carver CM1065 - JBL LX770

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #6 –
I use The Godfather, which has integrated cover search, and you can save it inside tags, or save it as a file in folder.
It is not good as batch searcher, but it works well. When patched, it can access AMG, but it is illegal.
TAPE LOADING ERROR

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #7 –
Quote from: reardon on
No, it is not copywritten.  Content companies will attempt to make this claim (illegally), but they have not succeeded in defending copyright of album art.  Do what you will with album art, it has been safely allowed under fair use interpretations for several decades.

+Reardon


That simply isn't true.

Even if it were, many of the images (especially photographic content) are protected by their own copyright. Photographic content is probably the best example, because ALL photos are protected by copyright law - even those taken of the family BBQ by uncle John.

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #8 –
Quote from: reardon on
Quote from: Eli on

Cover art is copy-righted material, and


No, it is not copywritten.  Content companies will attempt to make this claim (illegally), but they have not succeeded in defending copyright of album art.  Do what you will with album art, it has been safely allowed under fair use interpretations for several decades.

+Reardon

Can you cite a basis for this statement?

As a photographer and painter I am very familiar with copyright law as it pertains to visual art.  I second the other poster who pointed out that it really IS all copyrighted material and you do not have a fair-use right to distribute it without the copyright holder's permission.

I can't (nor would I want to) stop someone from downloading an image from my website for their own personal use, but if anyone tried to distribute my work without my authorization on a mass- or commercial- basis I could have lawyers all over them very easily.

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #9 –
I dislike all the internet cover-searching tools available for the bad quality most of these covers are scanned in.

Itunes has great covers in 600x600 px., mostly direct transfers instead of scans. When you've downloaded albumart with it, you'll find a mess of .itc files in you music folder. Search these (with F3 or whatever you like) and throw them into jpeg-extractor with a small batch script and you have the nice covers
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #10 –
Quote from: odyssey on
I dislike all the internet cover-searching tools available for the bad quality most of these covers are scanned in.

Itunes has great covers in 600x600 px., mostly direct transfers instead of scans. When you've downloaded albumart with it, you'll find a mess of .itc files in you music folder. Search these (with F3 or whatever you like) and throw them into jpeg-extractor with a small batch script and you have the nice covers


If I understand you correctly, you're describing something you get if you actually BUY a song on iTunes, right?

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #11 –
Quote from: odyssey on
I dislike all the internet cover-searching tools available for the bad quality most of these covers are scanned in. Itunes has great covers in 600x600 px., mostly direct transfers instead of scans.

odissey, I do agree with you. But let's be pragmatic : The iTMS has blocked cover access unless you buy songs from them, so the iTMS is not a solution anymore, unfortunately. And I am NOT going to re-buy all of my 1000 legally-bought CDs from them (I use EAC to rip them, no need to rebuy them).

So, since I'm NOT going to scan all of my 1000 legal covers either, I need a tool that allows me to get them across the Internet in batch mode. With good quality of course (500x500 minimum, nice and sharp like the iTMS... sigh...  ). So what's the best solution as of today, with quality as the primary concern ?

Thank you.

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #12 –
Quote from: plnelson on
Quote from: odyssey on

I dislike all the internet cover-searching tools available for the bad quality most of these covers are scanned in.

Itunes has great covers in 600x600 px., mostly direct transfers instead of scans. When you've downloaded albumart with it, you'll find a mess of .itc files in you music folder. Search these (with F3 or whatever you like) and throw them into jpeg-extractor with a small batch script and you have the nice covers


If I understand you correctly, you're describing something you get if you actually BUY a song on iTunes, right?

No you can do this on all music you import to Itunes. Unfortunately you WILL need to have an account to enable the functionality.

Quote from: Jose Hidalgo on
Quote from: odyssey on

I dislike all the internet cover-searching tools available for the bad quality most of these covers are scanned in. Itunes has great covers in 600x600 px., mostly direct transfers instead of scans.

odissey, I do agree with you. But let's be pragmatic : The iTMS has blocked cover access unless you buy songs from them, so the iTMS is not a solution anymore, unfortunately.

That's not correct. See my statement above. I did this myself, and i've never bought anything from Apple.
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #14 –
Quote from: LANjackal on
+1 for AMG access, although the database isn't every single thing out there, it covers at least 95% of it. I download mine via WMP11.

AMG? I thought all of their cover scans were something like 200x200 pixels. Have they gone to a higher-resolution, or are we talking about a different "AMG"?

    - M.

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #15 –
Quote from: Jose Hidalgo on
odyssey, sorry to say that, but it looks that you are the one who's wrong. See this :

http://labs.squidball.com/itunes/

or this :

http://tom.zickel.org/getartwork/

or many other sites.

I'm happy for you if it worked for your particular file(s), but the fact is that it doesn't work anymore, period.

You seem not to read any of my posts. How do these sites relate to Itunes? Answer is NOT! They (previously) got the artwork from the internet URL that someone revieled. Since they (as they write) now has encrypted the artwork, they cannot be decrypted by anything but itunes. So follow my guide as i wrote it, and it will work. (Yes you need to *INSTALL* Itunes)
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #16 –
Quote from: M on
AMG? I thought all of their cover scans were something like 200x200 pixels. Have they gone to a higher-resolution, or are we talking about a different "AMG"?

I agree with you. If resolution is less than 500x500, then I'm not interested.

Quote from: odyssey on
Since they (as they write) now has encrypted the artwork, they cannot be decrypted by anything but itunes. So follow my guide as i wrote it, and it will work. (Yes you need to *INSTALL* Itunes)

Don't worry odyssey, I know iTunes since the 1.0 version (I'm a long-term Mac-user). I have it installed in both my Mac and my PC, and I love it. I use it for my MP3's.
I also could open an iTMS account, that wouldn't be a problem.

*But* as you certainly know, I can't import my 1000 albums in FLAC (that's 15000 FLAC files) to iTunes, because iTunes just doesn't support FLAC (damn Apple for that). So how can I do then ??? I'd love to do as you say, but I don't know how. Thanks.

[dream]A Freedb equivalent database, made only of high-quality 600x600 iTMS covers... sigh...  [/dream]

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #17 –
Quote from: Jose Hidalgo on
*But* as you certainly know, I can't import my 1000 albums in FLAC (that's 15000 FLAC files) to iTunes, because iTunes just doesn't support FLAC (damn Apple for that). So how can I do then ??? I'd love to do as you say, but I don't know how. Thanks.

I tried to come up with a way to script out of this problem by fooling iTunes to think that a directory of files was a certain album. My research shows that it's possible if you have some mp3's correctly tagged with artist and album name and as well a correct filename (just the artist). However I'm too lazy to script it.

You could just use foobar2000 to convert your albums to mp3 (use some switches to speed it up as the audio doesn't matter).
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #18 –
Quote from: Jose Hidalgo on
But ... I can't import my 1000 albums in FLAC (that's 15000 FLAC files) to iTunes, because iTunes just doesn't support FLAC ...


According to this Hydrogen Audio thread, Leopard has support for FLAC. I suppose it's not so long till we find out if that's true or not now ...

That would make things easier for you.

I've found that the iTunes Store doesn't always recognize my albums even if it has them -- if the metadata doesn't quite match what the store is using, it can miss them.

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #19 –
Quote from: odyssey on
I tried to come up with a way to script out of this problem by fooling iTunes to think that a directory of files was a certain album. My research shows that it's possible if you have some mp3's correctly tagged with artist and album name and as well a correct filename (just the artist). However I'm too lazy to script it.
You could just use foobar2000 to convert your albums to mp3 (use some switches to speed it up as the audio doesn't matter).

Well, I guess I could do that (convert my 15000 perfectly-tagged FLAC files to mp3). That would take about 40GB @ 64Kbps if my calculations are correct (can we do less than 64Kbps ?). However, that would be useless until somebody comes up with some kind of iTunes script. I understand you're too lazy to script it (who isn't nowadays ?  ), but I'm way too lazy to look for 1000 album covers one by one with the iTMS. 

Sooooo... if somebody knows how to write this funny little iTunes batch script, I'd be willing to try it and give some feedback. It could interest *lots* of audio enthusiasts IMHO. Thanks.

(Nick, FLAC support in iTunes is a long story (your topic is a 2006 one), but it still hasn't been confirmed, and nobody can tell if it will be the case with Leopard)

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #21 –
This works neat for me.

I have an iTunes Store account but I haven't paid a cent. It's perfectly OK imo to register for ano iTMS account using your CC.
I have "Automatically download Album Artwork" checked.

The way I have things set up, when I add a new MP3 album via iTSfv,

1/ I get iTunes Music Store 600x600 artwork embedded to each of the new track
2/ A folder.jpg of the Artwork copied to Album folder

If I needed to, I can select all and Get Album Artwork then use a program to save it as Folder.jpg in the album folder. Either way, I end up with exactly what you guys want.

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #22 –
Thanks for your reply. I'm not sure to understand perfectly. You mean that with just an iTMS account, one can select all his iTunes MP3, select "download artwork" and get all relevant artwork from the iTMS, right ?

But the, what software exactly do you use to make the artwork go as "folder.jpg" into each relevant folder ? A link would be appreciated.

I'm not interested in embedded artwork, but I want to have one 600x600 iTMS "folder.jpg" image into each one of my 1000 folders. That's the idea. 

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #23 –
You mean that with just an iTMS account, one can select all his iTunes MP3, select "download artwork" and get all relevant artwork from the iTMS, right ? Yes. That's right. With an iTMS account, iTunes lets you do that for the music you already have in iTunes that is properly tagged.

Here is what I would do to get iTMS artwork in each folder. The iTSfv program I mentioned earlier - you can get from http://wmwiki.com/downloads/itsfv/beta/iTS...5.1.0-setup.zip

Don't Select ALL tracks in Music playlist until you get familiarised with what you are going to do.

1/ Select all the tracks of an album or few albums

2/ Right click the selected tracks, Get Info, clear the Artwork by unchecking checkBox. This is done so that we force iTunes to store and refer to the iTMS artwork. Press OK.

3/ Right click the selected tracks, get Album Artwork.

With an active internet connection, iTunes will automatically download the artwork.

Tip: In iTunes mini-store if you can see the album then it is quite guarenteed iTunes will retrieve the Artwork.




Now load iTSfv.

The default settings in iTSfv will embed Artwork to the file. Therefore, uncheck this setting in Validate > Tracks tab, but make sure Export Artwork as Folder.jpg is checked.

Press "Validate Selected Tracks" button in the middle bottom. iTSfv should export the artwork to relevant album folders.

If everything works as fine as you expected, you can select all music in iTunes and repeat the process.

Download of cover art - where are we ?

Reply #24 –
Wow ! Thank you McoreD ! I have seen your topic and I have subscribed to it !

This looks like a fine utility. Unfortunately I haven't been able to test it yet, since I don't have the MS Framework installed (BTW what is the required version : 2.0 ? 3.0 ?).

Latest news : the odyssey method... WORKS !!! 

First, I have created an iTMS account.

Then, using dBPowerAmp, I have batch-converted 25 FLAC test files to very low resolution mp3 (8kbps, CBR). Encoding time : about 4 files/minute, so if I take only one FLAC file per album (that's about 1000 files total for my whole collection), it will take about 5 hours. No big deal. BTW, all the 25 mp3 files take only 6MB of disk space. So my 1000 converted files will take only about 240MB. That's awesome !

Then I have imported the 25 mp3 files to iTunes 7.

Then I have tried to retrieve the album artwork from the iTMS. It all went perfectly, and iTunes retrieved quality artwork for 21 files out of 25, even when the album name wasn't exactly the iTMS' album name. Great ! FYI the 21 .itc files take about 5MB of disk space. So the final 1000 "folder.jpg" files will also take only about 240MB.

Now the only thing I need is to convert the bunch of .itc files into .jpg or .png files and put them automatically into each relevant folder. That's exactly what your software should do, McoreD. I can't wait to try it ! 

And then, if everything works well with my 25 mp3, I'll move on to a larger scale with all my albums...

Oh, one more question for McoreD : does your software allow to name each jpg file "artist - album.jpg" instead of just "folder.jpg" ? That would be great don't you think ? And foobar will recognize them anyway so...