MSC Mode album art

[digitaldel]

Assuming we are to implement album art in a generic way (i.e. albumart.jpg or folder.jpg, etc), what would be a good example of S/W that you are using to generate the file structure/album art (i.e. encoding tool) ?

[covertrussian]

Windows Explorer

All done by hand here, not sure about others though.

[epithetless]

I personally use Exact Audio Copy to encode and structure my CDs as MP3s (with the LAME 3.97 codec), Album Art Aggregator to grab album art from the net and automatically place it in my prearranged folders (as "folder.jpg" files), and MediaMonkey (v2.5.5 and v3.x) with the Album Art Tagger script to embed the jpegs in each song's ID3 tags. Alternately, I'll use eMusic's eMusic Remote Beta application to download online albums of (LAME-encoded) MP3s in the same structure as EAC and then proceed as outlined above.

[mattschuette]

The only software concerned for me is Foobar2000. I do all of the cover art fetching, saving and renaming by hand each time I rip a CD (with CDex or EAC). With Fb2k, I use ColumnsUI and the album art panel, which has a HIGHLY configurable script for determining which album art to show. So, I could convince foobar to display pretty much anything, which removes software from the equation for me; it's just down to my personal preference.

Right now, I use cover.jpg in with music files for normal albums, cover.jpg a directory above disc1, disc2, etc. folders with music for multi-disc albums; and a few named "%artist% - %album%.jpg" where I have some random tracks thrown together and want art for all of them.

I would be happy with cover.jpg, albumart.jpg, %album%.jpg, or %artist% - %album%.jpg all being recognized. I will never use folder.jpg because that is a Windows anomaly... is it really folder art or album art?? Just because Windows is stupid and will only handle folder.jpg, don't propagate their error. Honestly, for a portable, will people be including cd, tray, booklet, etc. images as well? I don't think that makes a lot of sense on a portable, so just displaying the first image you find in a folder might be good enough. For my multi-disc albums, it would be great if it recursively checked up a folder until it found something, but that sounds slow =)

[digitalq]

Originally Posted by mattschuette

I will never use folder.jpg because that is a Windows anomaly... is it really folder art or album art?? Just because Windows is stupid and will only handle folder.jpg, don't propagate their error. Honestly, for a portable, will people be including cd, tray, booklet, etc. images as well? I don't think that makes a lot of sense on a portable, so just displaying the first image you find in a folder might be good enough. For my multi-disc albums, it would be great if it recursively checked up a folder until it found something, but that sounds slow =)

Why can't it be folder.jpg? or one of the ones you use? I personally don't care because I put art in the tags. I like the idea of each song being self contained, so whether it's all dumped in a folder on my player or in a structure on my HDD it all just works. Folder is a common analogy for directory structure so, "folder.jpg" seems sensible and not stupid. (to me) if there are a bunch of songs in the folder from different albums (using a folder as playlist arrangement) fine, it's folder art. If the folder represents an album, then it is album art for the folder.

I think you could satisfy nearly everyone and most setups by looking first in the tag for art, then looking in the folder for *.jpg

JMO! And my 2 cents

Chris

[mattschuette]

Originally Posted by digitalq

Why can't it be folder.jpg? or one of the ones you use?

I just said I'd never use that. I think using that and something else would be great, I just don't want it to ONLY be folder.jpg for the reasons I outlined.

Originally Posted by digitalq

I personally don't care because I put art in the tags. I like the idea of each song being self contained, so whether it's all dumped in a folder on my player or in a structure on my HDD it all just works. Folder is a common analogy for directory structure so, "folder.jpg" seems sensible and not stupid. (to me) if there are a bunch of songs in the folder from different albums (using a folder as playlist arrangement) fine, it's folder art. If the folder represents an album, then it is album art for the folder.

Which just perfectly illustrates that everyone does things differently. Ok, "stupid" was too harsh, it's just not logical to me. My music still represents albums (or CDs, etc.) not random groups of tracks. Also, I don't like Windows being all helpful and assuming it knows that I want to treat a folder as music and not a folder, like every other folder on the hard drive. I avoid folder.jpg so Windows doesn't "help" as much.

Originally Posted by digitalq

I think you could satisfy nearly everyone and most setups by looking first in the tag for art, then looking in the folder for *.jpg

Sounds like a pretty good way to go. Definitely still tags, since that will work for most people. Then, like I said earlier, the first image would probably suffice.

[Adam Bomb]

Originally Posted by mattschuette

the first image would probably suffice.

I think this is more than just sufficient; it would be the ideal approach, reducing dependency on file names.