getmusicbee.com
Support => Questions => Topic started by: Steven on February 02, 2014, 12:58:35 PM
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It looks like discogs.com is making a change such that in order to retrieve pictures from discogs they will require you to register musicbee as an authorised application. They way i understand it, this is a once only requirement where MB will open a web page and you authorise musicbee in that web page.
However i feel that doesnt fit in too well with how users would expect MusicBee to "just work".
For the people who use musicbee to retrieve artwork, do you feel Discogs is an important artwork source (that you cant get the same picture from other providers).
I'm inclined just to remove discogs as an artwork provider but if people say its important then i will reconsider.
This change doesnt apply to retrieving tags - just artwork
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From my experience I get better quality pictures from fanart and gracenote whenever they have one available. Discogs rarely finds a really good quality picture for me and I usually end up using google even if discogs has one (and the other sources don't)
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Agree with ma_t14. Other providers find much better art in my experience.
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Never really paid much attention to where the art came from, just clicked on the highest resolution :). Did a few random albums just now and Discogs really didn't do any better than google or gracenote. Personally I'd be willing to do a one time registration (depending on what other info they plan on mining), but I also wouldn't miss disogs if it went away.
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Just like other changes, it's likely that heavy users of the site will show up later and start complaining about its removal. It seems the site has a strong collection on some specialized genres. My suggestion is to disable the site from artwork providers setting by default and put some warnings about the site's registration requirement on the setting's dialog or on a pop-up dialog when it's enabled.
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i'm not very keen to do the extra effort to build the authorisation protocols unless there is a strong reason and from my own experience i have yet to see anything that google or gracenote does not have, and cant recall any times where discogs was the best. It sounds similar to what others are saying.
Lets see if anyone complains
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I've never used Discogs for artwork. Last.fm is probably the best overall.
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I've never used Discogs for artwork. Last.fm is probably the best overall.
Really? :-\
I always get the worst quality artwork from last.fm
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I always get the worst quality artwork from last.fm
Ditto. If fanart.tv doesn't have it, I use album art downloader, which can pull high quality covers from iTunes & Amazon.
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Nearly all album art, i'll get it from Discogs but i use Discogs directly, not from within Musicbee.
I like the way how it's organised, search for an artist and i will get mostly all the albums, info and art from that artist that is needed.
If the artwork is not complete or too small, i'll look elsewhere.
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Gracenote / Fanart / Google nearly always superior to Discogs. Would not miss it.
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Really? :-\
I always get the worst quality artwork from last.fm
The issue with last.fm is that they have more than one version of each artwork, so I always download from the website manually.
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Nearly all album art, i'll get it from Discogs but i use Discogs directly, not from within Musicbee.
I like the way how it's organised, search for an artist and i will get mostly all the albums, info and art from that artist that is needed.
If the artwork is not complete or too small, i'll look elsewhere.
I do the same, Discogs has some rare / old covers i don't find anywhere else.
But i don't use it within Musicbee neither. I check and get all my covers and tags manually.
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I think that talking about manual downloading of artwork from discogs/last.fm is irrelevant to the purpose of this thread.
On the other hand though I am really curious about how discogs/last.fm have better artwork if you search for them manually and why those do not appear in the Musicbee artwork downloader. Does that have something to do with the respective APIs not giving full access to all the artwork? Steven?
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I think that talking about manual downloading of artwork from discogs/last.fm is irrelevant to the purpose of this thread.
On the other hand though I am really curious about how discogs/last.fm have better artwork if you search for them manually and why those do not appear in the Musicbee artwork downloader. Does that have something to do with the respective APIs not giving full access to all the artwork? Steven?
I didn't say that Discogs/LastFM have better artwork if i search manually, and i didn't say that some of them don't appear in the downloader, i just said that i don't use MusicBee's search engine for that kind of search.
But i gave advice about the quality of a source Discogs can be, and i think this is kind of relevant to the purpose of this thread.
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i'm not very keen to do the extra effort to build the authorisation protocols unless there is a strong reason and from my own experience i have yet to see anything that google or gracenote does not have, and cant recall any times where discogs was the best. It sounds similar to what others are saying.
Luckily the extra work for this didn't go ahead, as Discogs has imposed a limitation of 1000 requests per day per application on artwork retrieval.
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And all this time I've been racking my brains to figure out where in MusicBee Preferences Discogs is disabled! Perhaps you should change the language used, "Discogs disabled in Preferences" because it makes me think I need to apply a setting somewhere.
Anyway I don't mind having to register MusicBee, I like the ease of use and simple approach but I'm no idiot, I can go online and check a box if necessary.
As for getting better artwork from other sources well I think for each of us "Your mileage may vary", many times I can't find the appropriate artwork and I have no choice but to go manually find and add some, especially since Google's source rarely works the past couple of weeks. So having as many options as possible is my preferences. If there are users who honestly disagree then perhaps leaving it up to the user preferences by way of an enable/disable option would be better than just removing the whole thing.
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Regarding this:
Really? :-\
I always get the worst quality artwork from last.fm
The issue with last.fm is that they have more than one version of each artwork, so I always download from the website manually.
If I search Adele's 21 from the site, it lists 32 images: http://www.last.fm/music/Adele/21/+images
The smallest is 350X350, but most of them are 500X500. But from MB's artwork search, it's always 174X174 from last.fm for whatever album. Does this mean they don't allow access to the whole artwork pics through API?
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Thanks for pointing that out as i havent looked at the last.fm api call for ages and they do now support the large pictures
They are included now:
http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2_4/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip
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Last.fm is actually worth using now, hooray!
When did iTunes get added as an artwork source? That's cool, too. (Although I can get images twice that size from iTunes using Album Art Downloader, not sure what the differences is.)
Also, a small thing, but even though discogs has been removed from the list of options I see "discogs: disabled in preferences" in the artwork search window.
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Thanks for pointing that out as i havent looked at the last.fm api call for ages and they do now support the large pictures
They are included now:
http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2_4/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip
Thanks for updating this! Would you look at artist image as well to see if they now support larger artist images? From my experiences, last.fm is the best source for the images of obscure artists, even better than google. So would be great if that's supported too.