Author Topic: Option to save two artwork sources per album  (Read 12312 times)

john6555

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The wish is to be able to save a folder.jpg and another JPG file with a specified name (like Artwork.jpg) for each artwork update in MB. Maybe that seems like a bizarre request, so let me explain! :)

Unfortunately this is because of stupid Microsoft force-resizing of album art (folder.jpg) to 240px. There are registry hacks that sometimes provide a workaround to prevent Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center from resizing your folder.jpg artwork, but unfortunately it doesn't always work, even if you set the file as a read-only, hidden, system file. (I find this insane from M$ by the way - I updated thousands of tracks with nice new large artwork and as soon as I opened Windows Media Player -- poof -- they were all resized to 240px (200px pre-Windows 7).

john6555

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actually if there were an option to do all of these by default (instead of one or two at a time), even better:

- embed picture in tag
- save as folder.jpg
- save as [filename].jpg

john6555

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Not sure if you've had a chance to look at this yet - doubt it, considering all the other requests plus the various little bugs here and there - but I thought I would add another idea to this. If it were possible to tell MB to look for artwork other than folder.jpg by default (so albums will not look at folder.jpg but whatever you specify), this might avoid some of this annoyance with Windows resizing the folder.jpg files to 200px.

Also on a related note, when I use the "copy to same folder as the music file and name as" option, it seems to always want to output a PNG file instead of JPG.

Steven

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i'll try to look at this tomorrow but i might need to come up with a more restrictive approach than you are asking for though.
When saving as 'name as' option, i think it preseves the format of the original

john6555

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The alternative to folder.jpg that I use is Artwork.jpg - which I think (correct me if I'm wrong) is an iTunes standard. I suppose if you wanted to restrict this, you could give the option between folder.jpg or Artwork.jpg, but if there is a different standard (or you have a better idea!) I'd welcome any idea on this.

Jorgen

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I also got all large album covers saved as something else than "folder.jpg". It would be great if you could automatically display these in MusicBee.
Now it displays the smaller 300x300 album art I've got embedded in each file.

Steven

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I also got all large album covers saved as something else than "folder.jpg". It would be great if you could automatically display these in MusicBee.
Now it displays the smaller 300x300 album art I've got embedded in each file.
what do you name the external artwork as? it looks for 'front.jpg' and 'cover.jpg' at the moment but gives priority (at the moment) to folder.jpg. Based on the above i'll no longer give folder.jpg priority
Last Edit: March 21, 2010, 12:48:53 PM by Steven

Jorgen

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I have named them CoverArtOrg.jpg. It would be easy for me to rename them to something else, but I'm not sure if I would want to rename them to folder.jpg if WMP resizes those files without asking.
I think it's best to name them something unique so no other program modifies them.

I also have file CoverArt.jpg which is a 300x300 version of the artwork in each album folder, this is the file I embed into each mp3.

Steven

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The alternative to folder.jpg that I use is Artwork.jpg - which I think (correct me if I'm wrong) is an iTunes standard. I suppose if you wanted to restrict this, you could give the option between folder.jpg or Artwork.jpg, but if there is a different standard (or you have a better idea!) I'd welcome any idea on this.
is there a reason you need to be able to save to folder.jpg at all? why not just set '..name as' to Artwork (without .jpg, that gets appended) ?

tincanman2010

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I have the opposite problem - I want the option (maybe I missed it) to have no artwork at all. I don't want it embedded, I don't want it stored in the song's folder, I don't want it stored in a separate location. I don't want it period. Its just another thing to slow things down, another potential source of corruption and disease - and if I want to see what the cover looks like, I can google it.

john6555

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The alternative to folder.jpg that I use is Artwork.jpg - which I think (correct me if I'm wrong) is an iTunes standard. I suppose if you wanted to restrict this, you could give the option between folder.jpg or Artwork.jpg, but if there is a different standard (or you have a better idea!) I'd welcome any idea on this.
is there a reason you need to be able to save to folder.jpg at all? why not just set '..name as' to Artwork (without .jpg, that gets appended) ?
It's a good question! The only real reason I try to keep a hi-res folder.jpg around is because its such a Windows standard - for example, Media Center uses it. And when Windows reads (WMP or WMC processes) a music folder, it will eventually create the folder.jpg (the 200px one) even if it doesn't exist, and that low-res folder.jpg would override my Artwork.jpg in most applications including MusicBee. [edit: it looks like you said above that folder.jpg won't have priority in MB anymore]

One option for some might be to remove the WMP and WMC components from Windows, but unfortunately I can't go without them on my media center setup. Occasionally I run a batch file to delete all low-res folder.jpg files and replace them with the hi-res Artwork.jpg copy, to keep things in shape.
Last Edit: March 22, 2010, 07:52:33 AM by john6555

Steven

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could you try out this one:
http://www.mediafire.com/?dn2zmjenwdo

you can now select multiple locations in the Artwork tagging preferences - the only combination it wont accept is linking to the source picture + creating an organised copy

john6555

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great!

one more question while we're on the subject... is it possible to force the custom-named artwork to save as a JPG, similar to the way folder.jpg saves itself as a JPG regardless of the format you're pasting? ex: sometimes i trim artwork to square images in Paint.NET and whenever i paste this image into Musicbee, it only lets me save as a PNG. maybe i'm reaching but if there is some program code that converts the default folder.jpg to JPG always, perhaps it could also be used for this custom-named artwork?

Steven

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in the version above, if you put .jpg on the end of the template it will convert to .jpg
eg.
Cover.jpg
will convert png files to jpeg

Jorgen

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Does MB look for folder.jpg and cover.jpg each time you play a track or only when you scan for new files ?

Does it use these files even if you have embedded cover art ?