Now with Apps like SqueezePad around one soon discovers, that the resolution of album art matters a lot. And if your collection is like mine – you never really cared and have all types of resolutions in there.
I recently stumbled about a program that claims upgrade all your coverart automatically: Bliss
I’m always a bit sceptical about programs that claim to do stuff automatically – but let’s give it a go. Installation (on a Mac) was a breeze – the program then works in the background and you access it via the browser.
For my first try I configured it to the folder of my music library, turned off coverart embedding (I always have a folder.jpg for each album) and also turned off automatic mode. You can also configure what your minimum and maximum wanted resolution is – I used 500×500 as a minimum.
Bliss then starts to scan your library and tells you if your files are ‘compliant’ or ‘not’. With my easy settings it’s just telling me if the cover art is below 500×500 – but that’s exactly what I need: all albums that need some work on the cover art !
Clicking on the small edit icon, Bliss then tries to find good cover-art for you from different sources (MusicBrainz, Discogs, Amazon, Google) – and with a single second click your album art will be replaced.
For finding album art I used MediaMonkey before (which searches on Amazon as well) – but changing a cover there involves much more clicks (and if you have constraints like a minimum artwork size actually with MediaMonkey it sort of gets an unsolvable problem).
Unfortunately sometimes the found images are a complete mismatch. No problem in manual mode of course – just cancel. But as there isn’t much documentation on how the automatic mode works I don’t dare to activate it. I spent too much time in the past with tagging and finding (maybe to small but correct) coverart.
One should also note, that Bliss is only free for your first 100 covers. 1000 additional covers will cost you a 10$ license. Unlimited covers 30$. Quite fair prices I think considering the time you will save if you really start changing all your coverart.
So my conclusion: Though I’m only using Bliss with it’s minimal feature set right now (manual mode, just looking for covers) I really find it very useful. I guess I’m not brave enough to turn on automatic mode – but if you don’t have many covers yet at all (Classic, Boom, Transporter-users ?) this might be an option for you.
What other tools are you using for this task ?
17. October 2010 um 11:00
Hey Stefan, thanks for giving bliss a go – I’m the programmer.
The complete mismatch above is due to a bug with the integration with Discogs. Since Discogs started introducing ‘master’ records into their database, bliss was treating these masters as normal releases. Basically I just plucked the ID off the end of the match, and ignored whether the album was a ‘master’ or a plain ‘release’. Thus, when it found a match for your album, if this was a master ID it would look up the release with the same ID, and would bring back a totally different album.
I noticed this beginning to occur over the last fortnight or so, and I fixed it two days ago. The fix will go live in a couple of weeks.
One other point: Google images are never used for automatic insertion, just manual as above. It’s useful for finding rarer recordings/bootlegs etc.
7. December 2010 um 20:57
If you install the “Batch Art Finder”-plugin in Mediamonkey, minimum and maximum sizes are no issue at all.
19. December 2010 um 08:32
Thanks for this excellent tutorial. I have just one question, before I start using this. Currently I update my cover art with windows media player and it’s ‘find album info’, which brings me the covers. They are save like this in the directory’s (as hidden system files):
AlbumArt_{F48D8C9E-8C3F-49A8-ACBE-8AF801926EF6}_Large.jpg
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
Folder.jpg
Is only replacing the Folder.jpg file (which also changes it from system file to ‘regular’ file) sufficient for Squeezebox and Squeezepad?
thanks!
19. December 2010 um 08:36
You van configure on the server, which files it takes. In the default config it prefers the folder.jpg
19. December 2010 um 09:15
óki thanks!
23. March 2012 um 16:08
When I started using my iPad to control my SqueezeServer (via Squeezepad), I needed to add artwork to several hundred albums. I cannot remember where I heard about Bliss – possibly a Google search – but it was a real timesaver. Highly recommended.
I haven’t used it recently, but judging from his blog, Dan’s continually refining it and adding features.