batch album art download

[structurefall]

is it just me, or was there previously a thing to download all missing album art in the GUI, and now there isn't? is there some script hidden away somewhere to do this?

when i installed subsonic, it was when the discogs search functionality was all busted, so it couldn't get album art at all. now i'm on the current version and want to fill all the gaps in my fairly large collection, and doing it by hand would take weeks.

help!

ps: running centOS 5.5, x86_64.

[evandena]

I've been looking all over for it too and am starting to think the same thing.

[kroken]

This feature is no longer available due some problem with discogslimits. you can still go back to 4.1 and edit your own API key and use the autocover batch feature to download covers.

[structurefall]

but the cover search doesn't even use discogs anymore. that makes no sense!

anyhow, can you provide more details about this API thing? and will it cause me any serious problems to roll back? like any important database changes i should be wary of or anything? i installed via the redhat RPM, if that matters in any way.

[amorphic]

I also have a huge music collection that is far too large to add covers to manually. Does anybody have any further info on this? Is some kind of batch album art download on the horizon?

I've just installed Subsonic to replace my Ampache server and it is a huge improvement in every way except the lack of batched cover art downloading. Unfortunately not having covers is a bit of a showstopper for me...

[GJ51]

I'm not sure how it works for others, but on ver 4.2 whenever I see something without a cover I click on the generic music note cover, click on the "change link, and I get a selection of several covers to choose from. There are usually 8 versions available. I just select the one I like and it downloads and updates almost instantly.

You can even change the album art on albums that already have a cover.

[amorphic]

GJ51 - yep, that's how it works in Subsonic and it works really well as far as it goes.

However, I've just set up subsonic on my home server and it's found 1,224 albums. Manually adding cover art 1,224 times is unrealistic.

Most music library software has an option to "batch" download cover art. This process cycles through each album, grabs the first image result returned and allocates it as the cover art for that album. This usually happens automatically for newly-added albums too.

95% of the time the result is correct and all is well. The few that are incorrect can be manually updated as the user notices them.

Apparently older versions of Subsonic had this functionality so I'm not sure why it no longer exists. I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to implement as most of the work, (the image lookup/download) is already done.

[GJ51]

I can see how that would be a hassle. I've got about 1650 albums in my site, but when I upgraded from 4.1 all the cover art was still there.

Have you tried a manual update of the search index? I can't imagine that SS doesn't have a way to update most of the cover art automatically.

[amorphic]

Sorry but what do you mean by a "manual update of the search index"?

[GJ51]

Settings/Search/Update index now

Will run an index update manually instead of waiting for the scheduled time.

[amorphic]

Nope, unfortunately that doesn't update album art...

[GJ51]

You might want to look at something like MediaMonkey to update the cover art on your library. I think the trial version will do a library cover art update. It looks like since losing access to discogs batch update is no longer available.

[amorphic]

Yep I was thinking along similar lines. I'm going to try to approach this from the other side by downloading cover art as "cover.jpg" directly into my various album mp3 directories using an external application.

I'm using Linux so going to give this a go:

http://www.unrealvoodoo.org/hiteck/projects/albumart/

[GJ51]

I was reading through a posted to do list. It appears that batch cover updates is on the agenda for a future release. As I remember, it was something to do with being cut off by discogs that caused it to be dropped.

I'm patient enough to wait as I now have 3 servers, my Android phone, and Subair all up and running with no problems to report. Life is good.

[amorphic]

Ah well, glad to know it's on the todo list. I'm sure it's one of the more high-profile feature requests...

I'll definitely keep using subsonic in the meantime, it's bloody fantastic software. And once the auto cover downloading is fixed I reckon I'll even make a donation!...