Album Art

[jbloewheedle]

I have ripped my entire CD collection using EAC (very slow, for new CD's I am going to give dbPoweramp a try). Anyway, I dont have any album art showing up in SqueezeCenter and to be honest have no idea how to get it. Is this something I should have done when ripping?? Or can I get it "after the fact"?
Thanks
I apologize in advance for my ignorance!

[GeeJay]

EAC doesn't do album art. I use mp3tag to grab the artwork.

[bdelp]

Cool program to dl album art: http://www.uberview.org/
ÜberView is a single exe, no dll's or system files required. Simply run the executable and enjoy!

[bobm]

>very slow, for new CD's I am going to give dbPoweramp a try). <

I purchased dbPoweramp, very fast when the CD is in Accurate, and pulls down all the tags including Album art. I ripped about 30 CD's and so far so good. Bob

[jbloewheedle]

GeeJay - can mp3tag find artwork for the cd's I have ripped using EAC? I downloaded mp3tag but cant find anything about artwork on it.
Bobm - I agree, I tried dbpoweramp last night and it seems great.

[moley6knipe]

Open one album's worth of files, select them all and then select the Tag Sources menu - that'll give you some places to search.

Or just use Google Images to find the art, save it to disk and add it to the cover art bit of the tag panel (assuming you're displaying it, if not Ctrl+Q) by right-clicking!

If you're not bothered about embedding the artwork in each file (depends if you use these fiels with anything other than SqueezeCenter, such as iPod), you could just save the artwork in the same folder as the music files - save it as folder.jpg.

After all this, do a full clear and rescan of your library

[Fleury]

Ditto for Amazon - 90% of needed cover art is there for the taking, just save the image as folder.jpg. A handful of more obscure titles will require a google/dogpile search, and when all else fails scan the CD and use photoshop to reduce the image size (in pixels) to 300x300, with a file size of about 15-20kb. Once you have the folder.jpg in the ripped CD directory, right click in the blank cover box in MP3Tag, select folder jpg and save the tags.

[bpa]

You can use the FindArt plugin it simplifies getting album art from Amazon. It only does one album at a time.

See
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=49245

[maggior]

I got bit by the "gotta have my artwork" bug after getting the Duet. My large collection was ripped over the past 2 years and I had no artwork.

I used this program, which retrieved about 90% of the artwork from Amazon:
http://team.thenexusnet.com/nexus/AAA/

It is called album artwork aggregator.

For the stubborn albums with no artwork at Amazon, I scoured the 'Net (discogs.org was a great source) and used Media Monkey to add that artwork:
http://www.mediamonkey.com/

I'm new to this, so I'm going to try some of the other tools suggested here myself. But I thought I'd throw out there what has worked for me so far.

The beauty of AAA is that it will retrieve artwork for a whole long list of albums at once, rather than going through the pain of doing it an album at a time. Media Monkey will only do 1 album at a time, but it easily lets you drag artwork in from another source (which AAA won't do).

You never seem to be able to find just one tool that will do everything you want the way you want :-).

[GeeJay]

GeeJay - can mp3tag find artwork for the cd's I have ripped using EAC?

yep. Follow moley6knipe's instructions and you should be good to go.

It sounds like dbpoweramp may be a simpler solution, but to the best of my recollection both EAC and mp3tag are free (as I recall they both accept donations, but it's been awhile since I downloaded the applications so my memory may be faulty) and for me they work well enough.

[moley6knipe]

Yup, dBpoweramp does require parting with cash but it's so, so good I personally think it's worth it.

I've tried EAC a few times but it was slow and fiendish to set up (I know it's better nowadays) that I gave up.

The meta-data retrieval on dBa is absolutely superb, and you can mix and match it from different providers, you get the artwork and an almost unbelievably huge range of DSP effects that can do tons of things to your files/tags. And dBa will rip a disc as fast as it possibly can unless you tell it otherwise; a disc that doesn't need anything mroe than a burst pass (ie your rip matches the AccurateRip db) is blazingly quick. Secure and fast is possible!!

Sorry to harp on, but it really is my very favourite piece of software at the moment - it's saved me so much time ripping, tagging and adding artwork.

But hey! all that's just my £0.02, of course...