Thanks for the update. Seems to be working just fine again!

Would it be possible to create a .boo script for the amazon mp3 store? They consistently have 500x500 artwork, and it's one of the best resources I know of.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?u...amp;x=0&y=0

will there be an option to add album art to id3tags?

that would only make this program taht much better

Is there a way to get iTunes v 7 to use the folder.jpg in the artist\album directory where I stored it from searching in AAD? iTunes has it's own album art directory structure and doesn't recognize my folder.jps's when I load my itunes library with new discs.

Is there an automatic way to accomplish this with AAD and have it save itunes artwork directory structure as well as folder.jpg? I suppose one way to make this universal would be if AAD saved artwork in the mp3 tags (let's not debate if that is a good idea or not please). Trying to save some steps here.

I currently rip using either eac+mareo or foobar+mareo into flac and mp3. Then have to foobrowse through AAD and lookup artwork, then load itunes library then can't access artwork? I am trying to avoid using foo_dop as the rest of my family has to sync their ipdos as well and foo_dop doesn't have calendar syncing for iphone.

Thanks in advance for your help

I too am waiting for someone to update the amazon.boo script so it can search amazon again...

Sorry, I haven't had a chance to reply for a while.

First, AAD won't be storing images embedded in tags, sorry. If you want to work with iTunes, can I recommend the very fine iTunes Store file validator?

I've just tested the amazon scripts, and they seem to be working fine for me. Could anyone else confirm whether the amazon scripts work for them or not? If you aren't using version 0.6 of the amazon scripts, then you could try updating to the latest version of AAD which includes them.

Alex

damn, i see mine is 0.3... thought i had the latest aad, but i guess not... will try now

:UPDATE:

yeah, that was it, thank you ... now it all works with more results... and faster as well!

We've got a lot more images now, having just passed 10,000. That's not a huge number, but it's growing.

I've just added a new XML search interface that should make any searching albumartexchange.com much easier and more reliable that whatever page-scraping technique this script would have had to have relied on before.

http://www.albumartexchange.com/search.php?q=your+search+string

...is all it takes to get some very simple-to-parse XML back for matching results. There are details posted in the web site's forum covering the format of the results here: http://www.albumartexchange.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=66

Excellent, that's appreciated. I'll include an updated script for AlbumArtExchange in the next release.

(Which is coming along soon now, honestly! Sorry it's taken so long.)

Alex

if i start albumart via command line, it works great:



aad i get this error:
this means something like: the object reference was not set to a object instance.

edit:
ahh ok for the cmd version the album isnt optional. so how to only get some pics of the artists? a wildcard for the album?

I'll fix that for the next version, there's no reason the album shouldn't be allowed to be optional here.

Until then, to work around it, just pass " " for the album, so:

aad.exe /ar "madonna" /p "d:\test.jpg" /al " "

should do the job.

Alex

thank you! i figured out the same yesterday late at night. the result with a space char is the same as in albumart.

Here's the new script that uses the new AlbumArtExchange XML API: albumartexchange.boo

It will be included in the next release (this weekend, hopefully), but until then, if anyone would like to start using it and let me know if there are any problems with it, that would be appreciated.

Alex

lol net framework is realy interesting:
i tried /ma 0.6 but in germany i have to use 0,6 cause
in germany 1,500 means one and a half and 1.500 means fifteen hundred.

that's localization ^^

is it possible to filter such pictures:

GoogleImage: 112 ft. Puff Daddy & Notorious B.I.G.

Thanks for the cool application - just updating to the newer version.
I am just busy installing this...

Just a quick question: Is there any way of filtering results with the aspect ratio of 1:1??

I have local album art in two places -- as folder.xxx files in individual album folders, e.g.

F:/music/Pink Floyd/1971 - Meddle/folder.png

and a bunch of uniquely-named art files (artist_album.xxx) in a separate folder called 'covers'.

F:/covers/The Beatles_Revolver.jpg

I'm able to get AAD to list local album art -- using alternation to find jpgs, pngs, or gifs -- from one place but so far not both. Can someone tell me the alternation syntax for this?

No, I don't think so. The only thing wrong with the picture is that it is useless, which is a pretty subjective judgement to make. For all the software knows, the cover might actually be supposed to be pure black with a number grey 56 on it.

Not in the normal (interactive) application, no. I hadn't considered it necessary, as the thumbnails give a good indication of aspect ratio. For the command line version (aad.exe), as you can't preview the images, I did add this feature. To limit results to only 1:1 aspect ratio images, use /minAspect 1 in the command line.

How about folder.png|folder.jpg|folder.gif|/covers/%artist%_%album%.*

There's no way of grouping alternations, so you can't have (folder|cover).(png|jpg), for example. Each alternation has to stand alone. So, if .* doesn't cut it for the /covers/ folder, and you need to restrict to .png, .jpg, .gif, you have to add alternations for each of those too!

Alex

no dont filter black pictures with a dark gray 56, but pictures that have the same RGB value for 90% of the whole image - this cant be a valid picture or do you know such a album cover?

edit:
except the beatles's white album

maybe it could be implemented as an optional feature?

"It's like, 'how much more black could this be?' and the answer is none. None more black."

Also, The Black Album

In any case, I'm not going to add a feature to make a judgement on the usefulness of a cover based on its appearance. That's what the search result thumbnails are there for. If you just avoid using the google image search, you'll eliminate the vast majority of incorrect results at a single stroke anyway.

Alex

google image is the best source for rare or less known artists but ok. i try to handle this on another way

AlbumArt Downloader XUI v0.20 Released

New features and fixes:

• Added a Folder column to File/Foobar browsers (hidden by default)
• Added the ability to hide and show columns in the File/Foobar browser. Right click on any column header to hide or show a column.
• File/Foobar columns visibility and widths are now persisted.
• Window size and position settings now behave more like other settings in the way they are applied to new windows.
• Current settings are now applied to queued search windows as they are dequeued, rather than enqueued.
• Fixed crash in command line version when album or artist was not supplied
• Added "Forum" and "Donations" links to Help menu. If the donations menu entry is aesthetically or philosophically objectionable to you, highlight it and click the Delete key to remove it.
• AlbumArtExchange script updated to use XML API.
• Cover-Paradies script fixed

Download:
AlbumArtDownloaderXUI.exe (Installer. Recommended)
AlbumArtDownloaderXUI.zip (zip archive for those who don't like installers)
.NET Framework 3.5 (required)
AlbumArtDownloaderXUI-MediaInfoX64Upgrade.exe (x64 version of MediaInfo - must be installed if you are running a 64 bit version of Windows)

works great! do you think you could add a script for last.fm? or another website with a lot of artist images? cause i prefer artist images instead of album covers.

It's not designed for artist images, really. There is a script for http://artists.trivialbeing.org, but that seems to have been "Temporarily Offline" for long enough that it's return now seems unlikely.

To replace it, here's a script for Last FM artist images: lastfm-artist.boo.

Alex

ohh thank you
while it's not designed for artist images, it's working as good as for album covers!

one aditional question: the aspect ratio is between 0 and 1.
so this means 640x480 has the same ratio as 480x640? do you think it's possible to add an aditional option like /aspect "{horizontal|vertical}" that means that an ratio of 0.75 and horizontal allow all images f.e. 480 high and 480 to 640 wide but not vice versa?

Because of ColumnsUI NGplaylist I'm now also one of those AlbumArt hunting folks. Haven't tested your component yet, but anyway: Thank you.

OMG, the .Net framework 3.5 redist package is 195 MB.

Wow, your program is the bomb. Many thanks. I have some suggestions, because I download "front", "back" and "disc", and I guess this is what many people do: Would you add two additional buttons besides the save button, which save to a userdefined name? This would make the workflow faster. Currently I use "save as...".

Also, a quick preview when hovering images would also be nice.

A minor thing: I start it with foo_run, but it doesn't come to top. Can you make your program come to foreground, when called?

I'll see if I can think of a good way of doing this. Possibly /requireOrientation portrait|landscape, but I'm not set on that yet.

Thanks for your comments! I've had plans for a system of name Presets, which would cover the behaviour you wanted for front/back/disc, for quite a long time now, but have still never actually got round to coding it. It may still happen, if I end up with a lot of time to work on this app, but I can't say when.

The problem with previewing on Hover is that previewing causes the full sized image to be downloaded, which is an action I'd rather be more explicit than just a hover. Also, having tested it out, it ends up being more irritating than anything else, as the question of when to dismiss the popup becomes a problem. Moving the mouse outside the popup (the usual way of dismissing one) can be a big annoying move if it is a large image, and it is easy to accidentally popup a preview when you didn't want one. So, on balance, no, hovering will not pop up previews, sorry.

I'm not sure why you are seeing the application not come to the front when it is started with foo_run - it always has for me. Do other programs you start with foo_run come to the front?

Alex

Just realized clicking on the image shows a preview, this is enough. Yes, front/back/disc would be nice.
OK, at first start it comes to front. But when I uncheck the "Search in new window" option, in order to have only one instance, additional calls via foo_run do not bring the window to front, this is what I mean.

Great tool, I use it with Winamp though...
Is there a way to make it run through Winamp's Media Library automatically?



edit:
Why does it always reset to "Folder.*" when I run the File Browser and choose to save as "%album%.*"?

Ah, OK, yes I see this now. I'll fix that for the next version.

I suppose, if Winamp exposes its media library to external applications through an API, a Winamp Browser could be written. It's not a priority though, I'm afraid, as I'd have to learn the Winamp API first!

Could you be more specific about the steps that cause this problem? The only thing I can think of that might be related is that if you start a search from an item in the File Browser, then the path to save to in the Search Window is automatically set from the path to the item in the file the search was launched from. If that's not it, could you try opening a new window (using the menu), entering the value you want for the save path, then closing the window. Open a new one again, and it should show the changed value.

Alex

Ah, yes... after a restart the problem is gone, thanks.

Another suggestion:
When I resize the cover previews, could the whole item be resized, too, so the text is not truncated?

I did look into this, but when I tried both possibilities, I found having the size of the preview and the size of the whole item being independent to be easier to use.

Just to check - you are aware you can resize the whole item by grabbing the dragger on the right hand edge of it? Also, you can also choose to have the text underneath the item, so it is less truncated, by clicking the little curved arrow thing on the bottom right of the item. In that mode, the whole item is resized when the image is resized too. There's a slight cosmetic bug with this mode in that the information link icon and the curved arrow to switch back to the original mode get in each others way, but I should have that fixed for the next version too.

Alex

I' aware of the separate resizing possibilities indeed, but I didn't know if this was by design. Thanks.

Ah... another suggestion:
I would appreciate a possibility to specify special character replacements.

The AAD replaces : by _, but Winamp requires - instead...

edit:
Why do the saved pictures always have a great quality, while the preview images have a lot of visible artefacts?

I'll consider it. I'm not sure how generally useful it would be (why does Winamp even care if _'s are in the filename?), and there's no room to add that to the Options area without making it take up considerably more space. Anyone else here want to say if they'd find this a useful feature or not?

Possibly because the full size images haven't downloaded yet? AAD shows a thumbnail for the results it finds. If you preview one, it starts to download the full sized image to display, but until it's downloaded the preview will show a scaled-up version of the thumbnail. It says "Full sized image downloading..." at the top of the image while this is happening. If you keep the preview visible for long enough, it should replace itself with the high quality image soon enough.

Alex

It's quite hard to decide which image to download without having the "full quality" thumbnail... is it possible to increase their quality a very, very tiny bit?

Unfortunately, no. The thumbnail is as provided by the source website providing the cover art, so the size and quality of it is not under my control. If you need to see full size images before you choose which one to save, you can either just click on a few of the most likely candidates and wait for them to download, or use the option to always automatically download full sized images.

Alex

Hi, I tried the same, and I think it is realy a bug in this version, with version 0.19 erverthing works fine...

Thanks for this nice programm

phiber

OK, let me get this straight. You run AAD, then click File, New, File Browser. You then click the Options link, and in the "Specify path to find images" box, enter "%album%.*". You then close the file browser window. You then open a new file browser window (again), click the Options link, and the "Specify path to find images" does not show the "%album%.*" that you had entered?

The above works just fine for me, but if that's not what you are doing, or not the result you are seeing, then please give me detailed steps like those to explain what you do, and the result you get.

Thanks,

Alex

I use the explorer extension to select an artist with e.g. 5 cds
- "Specify path to find images" is e.g. folder.jpg
- then i select all 5 cds and press "get artwork for selection"
- the 1st cd is O.K.
- but all other cds have a wron "save image to" path (alway's %artist%%extension%oldfilepahtof.folder.jpg

phiber

Thanks for the extra info. I think I might have tracked down the problem - are the other searches being held in the queue? That could have been a bug introduced between 0.19 and 0.20, as I changed how settings applied to windows as they are dequeued. If that's the case, I'll have it fixed for the next version.

Alex

yes, all other searches being held in the queue.

phiber

AlbumArt Downloader XUI v0.21 Released

This is a bug fixing release, to address the issues that were raised over the last few days:

• If the existing search window is re-used for a new search, it is now brought to the foreground.
• When the thumbnail information is displayed below the thumbnail, the info button no longer overlaps the button to toggle the information to display to the side.
• Fixed bug where if a search initiated from the file browser was queued, it would have the wrong path to save images to popuplated.
• Removed artists.trivialbeing script, and replaced it with LastFM Artist.

Download:
AlbumArtDownloaderXUI.exe (Installer. Recommended)
AlbumArtDownloaderXUI.zip (zip archive for those who don't like installers)
.NET Framework 3.5 (required)
AlbumArtDownloaderXUI-MediaInfoX64Upgrade.exe (x64 version of MediaInfo - must be installed if you are running a 64 bit version of Windows)

Updating immediately, thanks for the quick fixes.

Is it planned to add sth like Multi-Language Support?

No. Internationalisation is an absolute pain to do, and even more so to retro fit to a project that wasn't built to support it from the start.

OK, no problem then.

it are teh roxxorz

I use only embedded arts. Is this with the toll possible?

I use Amazon or Wikipedia. Why run MP3s through yet another app?

Does this offer high resolution inserts and CD labels?