program to download cd covers?

[Atomic]

Im building a media PC and would like it to be able to display the cover of the album that is playing, its gonna take ages to search through and find them all by hand (few thousand albums) so:

Are there any program that can scan the IDv2/v3 tags or folder name and find the album name, download the cover and store them for me?

[DsW]

Im building a media PC and would like it to be able to display the cover of the album that is playing, its gonna take ages to search through and find them all by hand (few thousand albums) so:

Are there any program that can scan the IDv2/v3 tags or folder name and find the album name, download the cover and store them for me?

You wish!

You could, relatively easily, write some code to scan ID tags from MP3 files but the difficulty is then mapping these to URLs for the CD covers.

You could try something like programmatically plugging the ID values into the HTTP form on this page - http://www.slothradio.com/covers/ - and submitting.. but then how do you grab the image form the results? Take the first image on the page?

That would be very messy to do in code and you would need to go through them all anyway to check the results.

What I'm trying to say is that I don't think there is an easy solution to your problem - its going to involve effort whatever you do.

Why not just use a scanner than can do multi-photo scanning and gradually work your way through you album collection?

cheers,
dave

[directhex]

actually, pretty simple to write. the API for communicating with amazon is pretty well documented, allowing open-source projects like muine to automatically download cover art from there.

[directhex]

infact, a housemate wrote a tiny php script where you called script.php?search=albumname+artistname and it'd return the high-res album art from amazon. getting the info from the mp3 would be a pretty simple job with perl & a command line mp3 info return facility, as found in mpg321

[Atomic]

you don't happen to still have that script your housemate wrote?

Im sure i could knock something up to read the directory tree and submit the string in a url easily enough...

[directhex]

looks like he nicked it from somewhere else rather than writing it himself

http://pling.net/~jo/AmazonCovers.txt

[DsW]

actually, pretty simple to write. the API for communicating with amazon is pretty well documented, allowing open-source projects like muine to automatically download cover art from there.

Fantastic! You learn something new every day!

cheers,
dave

[Atomic]

Well, with the slothradio link I've managed to get a few hundred of the covers down, I think im just gonna do say 20 a day and I'll finish it eventually...

[Howard]

You know if you rip the music with WMP9 it automatically adds the cover art to the folder the album's in? YOu can then have the folder view on Thumbnail and see lots of pretty pictures when you go into your Albums folder

[directhex]

you also get wonderful microsoft DRM to prevent you, god forbid, playing your music without windows.

importing your library into muine will do the same job on pre-ripped music.

or write a very small perl script to download an image using the above script, dump it as folder.jpg, and hide it