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General => MusicBee Wishlist => Topic started by: ava_adore94 on July 15, 2021, 08:50:56 PM

Title: More options for album art
Post by: ava_adore94 on July 15, 2021, 08:50:56 PM
Hey all!

I've been using MusicBee for about 5 years now. I've never found a better media player, especially with this many options for customization. That said, there's one thing I would love to see expanded upon.

I'm pretty particular about album art quality and also pretty particular about maintaining consistency across my collection. I save the highest quality source images I can find and resize them in GIMP to 700x700 pixels, which I use because it's the standard size embedded in Bandcamp downloads and I buy from there a lot.

After resizing them I use the "Paste album cover" feature to set the image. However, I've noticed that once embedded they come out with more JPEG compression and artifacts than the original image I copied and pasted.

I assume this is done to keep the filesize relatively small, but I think it would be great to have more control over this feature. Being able to choose file type, image quality, etc. when pasting album art would be really beneficial. In order to maintain a consistent size, it would also be cool if pasting or otherwise embedding album art allowed you to set a maximum image size which MusicBee will automatically scale larger images to, similar to the same option you're given when synching music to a device.

All of that being said, I don't know anything about coding or creating a program, so I have no idea if these suggestions are even possible or just a pipe dream. However, I thought it was worth suggesting just in case it is something that can be considered.
Title: Re: More options for album art
Post by: hiccup on July 15, 2021, 09:37:59 PM
Welcome to the forum ava_adore94

Two observations that don't directly address your specific wish, so I'm sorry about that.

You say that you are particular about album art quality.
But you resize to 700x700.
Some providers provide very hi-res 3000x3000 artwork images these days.
That may be a little bit much, but 700x700 is surely at the low-end spectrum these days.
And any processing done on it will usually make it even worse.

Why not keep the best image size that you have been able to acquire, save it at that resolution (or resize to some maximum of e.g. 1600x1600), put it in the album folder, and link to it?
If it's 600x600 you'll know you will want to look for a better version someday, if it's 1600x1600 you'll probably be assured (for a while ;-) ?
Title: Re: More options for album art
Post by: ava_adore94 on July 15, 2021, 11:14:39 PM
Hi, thanks for the reply. I suppose I should have been more specific. Sometimes artwork grabbed from places like iTunes can be blurry, pixelated, desaturated, or even sourced from a badly scanned picture. I do save high resolution copies of all the album art I use in MusicBee - I have well over a hundred that are 3000x3000 or larger - and I try to get my art from official sources like artist and label websites, PR sites, etc. whenever possible. That's what I meant by being particular about quality.

I do make copies that I resize down to 700x700, and I do realize that's a considerable loss of quality. As I said though, these are just copies that I embed into my albums on MusicBee for the sake of consistency across my library. I suppose the point of my original post is that I think it would be cool if MusicBee could do the resizing for me - generating an embedded image that's downscaled to a specific size and linked to an organized copy in the album's folder.

I know it would make more sense to just use whatever the biggest and best images

Hopefully this clears up what I meant and what my intent is when it comes to my suggestion. Cheers!