Announce: FindArt plugin beta

[bpa]

Summary
The FindArt plugin provides a simple way to find and save cover art from within SC.

It is not intended to provide the bulk loading of cover art. It is intended for small collections, fill in missing art or correction of existing cover art. It only works from the SC Web interface. The user interface is a bit clunky as I didn't want to write code to do album browsing. This is a beta release as plugin needs more testing with different browsers, networked drive configurations and various character sets.

What it does
The FindArt plugin searches Amazon for cover art based on the Album name of the playing song. The user can save selected cover art either in the album folder or in a designated folder. The plugin does not handle SC's advanced cover art naming possibilities just standard cover.jpg, folder.jpg etc.. If trying to save art into album folder make sure SC process has permissions to do so.

Install
Install the plugin by unzipping into the Plugins directory appropriate for your installation - lookup Wiki. After installation restart SC and there should be a "Find cover art" extry in the Extras menu.

To install in SqueezeCenter 7.3 and later see http://forums.slimdevices.com/showpo...2&postcount=14


Use
To use - play a song from an album. Go back to "home" and select the "Find cover art" from Extras. The LHS panel of WebUI should display current cover art and first cover art from search of Amazon. A max of 10 covers are retrieved from Amazon - use Next & Prev to go through the matches. The Amazon ASIN number is linked to Amazon detailed info page - useful to check album details.

Settings
There are a number of settings which affects where cover art is saved and also how Amazon search is performed. The following is a brief description of the settings and their use.

"Do a database scan after save" - if checked then after a cover image is saved into an album folder, a database scan will be performed of album folder. After the save and scan to actually see the update cover images will depend on the browser but you generally need to reload the page Embedded art may take precedence - I don't know as I never tested.

"Replace current folder art" - If saving art into an album folder - the plugin will rename the current covert art image (adding a digit to end). This means new cover art file should be the file that is used.

"Save art in special folder" - cover art will be save in the designated folder ("directory name for cover art" setting) and not in album folder (so previous scan and replace options are ignored). The saved file name will include the album name and artist name This is useful if SC cannot write into album folders - user can subsequently move saved art into album folder and then initiate a database scan. Select this settings if all tracks are in the same folder/directory.

"Cover art name" filename to be used when saving in album folder.

"Select Amazon locale" - the Amazon locale to be used for searches. The search results will depend on the locale as some albums may not be on sale in some countries and cover art can vary by country.

"Select search type" Choose between Title search or Keywords search. A keyword search just uses words of album title that exceed min length setting. Keyword search is useful sometimes when album name entered in SC is somehow different from Amazon title.

[richboyce]

Thanks bpa - works great for me!

Rich

[auronthas]

Hi bpa,

I can't find FindArt in Extra, do i need to have the latest SC 7.1 to work with FindArt plugin? Currently, mine is SC 7.0.1 - 19705.

Second question, after extracting FindArt.zip in plugin directory, i found there is only a file FindArt and there is no FindArt folder, is that correct file/directory path?

TIA

[bpa]

FindArt will work with both 7.0.1 and 7.1.

What OS ?

If you using Windows and used Internet Explorer to download the zip file - IE sometime puts an extra wrapper around the zip file.

The plugin goes into a SC directory called server/Plugins/FindArt - and if installed correctly there will be a number of files in the FindArt directory - including Plugin.pm, Settings.pm, strings.txt and install.xml


Edit:
I see from signature you're using Vista - you may need to check on the Plugins directory as it may be different to path I gave.
My guess is that you need to extract the file from the single FindArt file you have.

[auronthas]

Thanks.

Strange, the file extraction seems to work now.

I just downloaded FindArt.zip again, after extraction, there is a FindArt folder with subfolder, bin, HTML, and four other files.

Yes, my OS is Vista, FindArt plugin is installed in C:\Program Files\Slimserver\Server\Plugin

OT, why the directory is Slimserver instead of SqueezeCenter? Since day one, the directory is unchanged. Anyway, everything is working fine, not a big deal.

Cheers.

[bpa]

If you upgraded from 6.x - it is possible the installer used the existing directory called Slimserver rather create a new one which would have been called Squeezecenter

[auronthas]

Thanks for quick response.

Indeed, my SC is upgraded from 6.x

[sander]

This plugin is good at finding art, but has trouble saving it.

In the Web UI I see:
Failed - error while saving covert art.

in the logs:
Plugins::FindArt::Plugin::saveAmazonArtOK (597) Couldn't save cover art in /usr/media/Music/T/Tom T. Hall/1978 - Places I've Done Time

Any ideas?

This is 7.2.1 on Ubuntu 8.04. The permissions on the Music directory seem to be OK, but I'm unsure on how to check.

TIA

[SlimboJimbo]

I had the same problem. It was indeed the permissions that was the cause.

[bpa]

When Squeezecenter is installed it creates a user with userid of "squeezecenter" and group "nogroup". When Squeezecenter is run as at startup (or via the init.d script) - Squeezecenter will run with the userid of "squeezescenter"

Normally music folders need only have read permission for user "squeezecenter" as SC never modifies user music foilders or files in those folders. The FindArt plugin needs to write the album cover files into the folder so there is a need to have "write" permission for "others" on the album folders.

in your example the following comman would change the permission
chmod o+w "/usr/media/Music/T/Tom T. Hall/1978"

In Nautilus you will probably need to enable them in the properties dialogue/permission tab for the folder - set "create & delete files" under "Folder access".