Author Topic: Request to replace album art providers (if possible)  (Read 2642 times)

Lore

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Hi Steven,

I noticed that Album Art Exchange has been disabled as requested by the site owner; besides, freecovers.com seems dead unfortunately (a page with generic ads is actually shown).
My request is the following: is it possible to replace these providers with new album art providers?
I did some search and found 2 sites that provide APIs to search for covers:

1) AllCDCovers.com: it requires registration to use the API but covers can be freely downloaded -> http://www.allcdcovers.com/api
2) FreeCovers.net: it's the opposite, it does not require registration to use the API but requires registration to download full size covers (however preview covers - usually about 400x400 - do not require it) -> http://www.freecovers.net/api/

Both APIs return cover type (e.g. Front) and dimensions, so data could be filtered to show e.g. the biggest Front cover in MusicBee.
I think that AllCDCovers.com expects users to access the web page (e.g. for advertising), so search results could open new MusicBee tabs with the URL to download the cover (the best would be if MusicBee remembered the album for which the covers was being searched, so that it could download the cover to the correct location when clicked).
For FreeCovers.net, it could be enough to have the preview cover as downloadable from MusicBee.
I did not find other album art sites providing an API so I did not consider them (they would probably require a lot of code parsing to obtain the cover - like Album Art Downloader does); one of them is e.g. cover-paradies, that has lots of excellent covers (and lots of ads too...).

Kindly let me know what you think about this request. I added "if possible" to the subject because I understand that there is not an easy way to download a high quality album art directly from MusicBee; the only compromise could be to add sites that provide an API (like the ones above) and give some simplification to users (e.g. autodownload in the right folder from the web page).
Thanks and regards,
Lore

Steven

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actually i already use freecovers.net - its just a mistake calling it freecovers.com
however, i see they have been doing some changes on the website and some things arent working at the moment. I'll check again later in the week.

re: allCDcovers, i had seen them before but didnt think people would be willing to click on a website page and have to manually download a picture.

Lore

  • Guest
actually i already use freecovers.net - its just a mistake calling it freecovers.com
however, i see they have been doing some changes on the website and some things arent working at the moment. I'll check again later in the week.
Oh ok, I saw no result + freecovers.com and I thought that was the one being used :)
re: allCDcovers, i had seen them before but didnt think people would be willing to click on a website page and have to manually download a picture.
Ok, I also noticed that site owners require a registration for API where they want lots of infos about the use you would do of the API, so I think that any simplification in downloading covers (e.g. in an automatic way) would not be accepted.

Lore