Whats the best way to get the album art? itunes finds less than half my collection for some reason? I had started to use discogs, and drag the artwork in, but I've got at least 700 albums without art, and that could take a while.
Any programs that are good at searching and assigning by themselves?
Whats the best way to get the album art? itunes finds less than half my collection for some reason? I had started to use discogs, and drag the artwork in, but I've got at least 700 albums without art, and that could take a while.
Any programs that are good at searching and assigning by themselves?
Try Album Art Aggregator. It links to amazon.com's domestic and overseas databases and usually finds 80% of what you're looking for. From there, it's a simple double click on the right cover. If it's older / out-of-print titles, you're on your own to find the jpeg on the Internet. Based on my own experience, some of your collection may simply be unobtainable.
I don't need to get to 100% although it would obviously be nice, just something that resembles most of it. Itunes just doesn't seem at all usefull for some reason.
Agree about AA Aggregator - good tool but not fully automated by any means. I was dreading doing my collection of 2,000 FLAC albums but it only took a day to get jpg's of about everything I had using Aggregator and Google. Fixtunes is a good application if you are using iTunes.
I'd watch out for the "fetch album art" feature in iTunes. In version 7+ it doesn't store the artwork in the ID3 tags (so that Slimserver can read it) but rather in it's own database. Basically it's great if all you ever use is iTunes and your iPod (typical Apple)
For manual searching http://www.discogs.com/ is an amazing site, requires a little getting used to, as it'll contain vinyl and every format released. for most things it has pretty high resolution covers, and backs of the cd case when you click on the album art.
I just did this - MP3Toys found most of my album art. It's fully automated, uses multiple web sources for the images, and reads tags, filenames, and directory structure to identify the tracks. All you have to do is download it and point it to your music and it does the rest.
The only problem is that the program seems to be very unstable - it crashed (gently) after a while just about every time I ran it. My guess is that this is because I have some free format MP3 files, which most players can't handle - if so, it won't affect anyone else. Anyway it found just about all my album art for me in about an hour, so I don't care :-).
If you're on a Mac, Export Artwork (http://www.dizzypenguin.com/automac-it/) will automatically get artwork for your entire iTunes music collection. It's great - I've used it for years.
Used mp3toys, very nice program, ok so around 10% of the art its found seems to be wrong (at a guess), but its got something for everything, and it did do it all by itself. Now just means I've got to slowly spot the 200 or so that have the worng album cover, some more obvious than others.
Strange though, done a clear and rescan in SS 6.5.3 and when viewing albums by gallery view it doesn't have any artwork at all? just a big question mark for each one, they are all there when you click on the albums though.
And itunes still can't find over half the artwork even though it is all now a jpg in the album folder, anyway people know to sort out itunes 7.3.1 so it sorts itself?
The "BEST" way is to get covers manually. It's not the fastest of course.
If your music is properly tagged and album names are correct, iTunes is an invaluable source for decent resolution images for a large collection of music. You can easily imbed the artwork into your tracks with a simple script (it's been posted here before by myself and others).
I have never recommended the site I'm about to mention, but if you guys find it useful, please consider donating to them. The only reason i have never mentioned it is because I have been selfish and didn't want the resource slowed down.
Amazon is a last resort as they always have the worst images around and often on white backgrounds or other formats unsuitable to use as cover artwork. They also have likely a smaller collection of images than iTunes believe it or not. At least that was my experience with some extensive searching.
http://allcdcovers.com has quite a bit of material as well, including cover backs and sometimes liner notes.
There are other CD cover sites with images also provided by users - just google for "cd covers"
Most third-party programs unfortunately use Amazon and are therefore useless to me.
As mentioned, sometimes Discogs.com has something rare, but best to try the other places first. I manage to complete most of my collection with iTunes and RateYourMusic. Every now and then I just break down and scan the cover myself - this is always my last resort as it's definitely more involved than click-click-drag on a web page. But of course produces the best quality if you're willing to spend the time.
Lastly: If possible, don't run any iTunes beyond 7.2.x for now if you're concerned about SlimServer's ability to read its database.
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