blog: script for finding music folders without art

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nikos
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blog: script for finding music folders without art

Post by nikos »

here's the comment area for today's blog post found at
http://zabkat.com/blog/WSH-music-art-folders.htm
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

Post by Tuxman »

I'd recommend this tool instead.
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

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You know that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you wake up in the morning and for just 3.6 seconds you actually think it's 1995 again and everything bad that happened since hasn't actually happened, and you bask in the glow of a bright and shiny future? For all of 3.6 seconds?

That's what reading these kind of blogs is like. It's almost as if Nikos doesn't realise that people use embedded album-art these days, placed there by the same ripping programmes which automatically scour the net for the tagging metadata which is added to the tracks themselves as they are ripped?

(We also won't mention that people don't actually rip music anymore, since "physical media" is effectively dead. Or, maybe, HMV moved to Greece to sell all their leftover stock that the rest of the world forgot about?)

For example, the classical end of my music collection alone comprises something like 350GB in 1505 folders with 10248 individual files - and all of them have album-art (so it conveniently travels with them and is displayed no matter what device they're ported to) - but nary a JPG in sight.

Write a script which checks for tracks that don't have embedded art, and then it might just not be 1995 anymore. :wink:

A better question is why doesn't the window produced by x2 using <Alt+D> "Folder Statistics" allow for right-clicking to copy the displayed information? Why did I have to manually type "350GB in 1505 folders with 10248 individual files"? <Ctrl+C> is a bit of overkill as it copies the whole bleedin' branch!

And Tux, what are you doing recommending a tool that actually requires .NET? Isn't that anathema to everything you stand for (as it should be)? There are plenty of others which do not suffer that particular affliction. :shrug: MediaMonkey, dBpoweramp, et al... ah, whatever happened fond memories of EAC (not for art though)... I thought all those HydrogenAudio lads were purists...
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

Post by Tuxman »

Kilmatead wrote:It's almost as if Nikos doesn't realise that people use embedded album-art these days
I don't.
Kilmatead wrote:And Tux, what are you doing recommending a tool that actually requires .NET?
Because it does its job well. I would indeed prefer a solution which works without .net, but all the alternatives (including Winamp's album art finder which is quite neat too) begin to struggle when you are searching for more obscure records like the ones I love to listen to.
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

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You don't use embedded art because you're in that strange position of being both too young and too old at the same time. The very definition of a lost generation who doesn't seem to move its media around very much whilst thinking to itself "yeah, I could be cool if I wanted to be - I just don't want to be right now". :wink:

I just use MediaMonkey - if it can't find an album on the collective breadth of Amazon sites (.com, .co.uk, .ca, .fr, .de, .co.jp) then that one in-a-million is just an image-search away. :shrug:

dbPoweramp will basically scour the Earth looking for all art leaving no stone unturned - except I think one has to pay for that one.
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

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Kilmatead wrote:The very definition of a lost generation who doesn't seem to move its media around very much
Adding a cover.jpg file to my portable player(s) is not too much effort yet. :|
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

Post by Kilmatead »

Music these days is a disposable commodity anyway - heck, with the absurd advent of Spotify (and all that nonsense) kids these days don't even have music collections - they just have clouded-memories of what's in all their friends' playlists (note: not "collections", but "playlists"), so they don't even need to bother owning something, never mind caring about a JPG of it.

:shrug:

"cover.jpg" - <Snigger> Yep, you're carbon-dating yourself. :D
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

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Kilmatead wrote:Music these days is a disposable commodity anyway
Good music will never be for me! - And those using Spotify will never listen to good music because they're not in their contract. :biggrin:
Poor young generation. Reduced to radio nonsense.
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

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Tuxman wrote:Poor young generation. Reduced to radio nonsense.
If it wasn't for proper midnight radio stations like Radio-Television-Luxembourg (back in the day) and many other off-shore brands there wouldn't be any decent music to listen to anyway, so radio itself is not to blame. The record companies (in their dying throes) have always known that engendering a lobotomised generation of kids is the only way to secure a proper pap-filled future - no matter how it's consumed.

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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

Post by Tuxman »

BFBS1 has acceptable music, but not much. Privately I only listen to Jazz stations on the web if I ever feel like listening to music I can't choose from.
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

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Write a script which checks for tracks that don't have embedded art
see the first article of the WSH series talking about Shell.Application and you can find where these details are stored (ID3 extension?)
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

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nikos wrote:...you can find where these details are stored (ID3 extension?)
Why do you think I aimed that statement at those of us who are stuck in 1995? It's not difficult to do, but it's a lot more work than checking for the existence of a JPG file. Using VBS it would probably be an exercise in masochism, though any other language could do it directly:

COM won't extract the individual frame data from within ID3v2 tags - essentially one would need to open each file (binary), seek the ID3 header, parse the sequential frames therein looking for an APIC identifier... if it finds data there (doesn't matter what kind), it could be said to "have an image"; if no APIC-frame exists, it could be said to "not have an image".

To put it in your language (having spent the whole day yesterday hurting myself by reading your memoires), much the same way as your evil PIDL things are composed of concatenated SHITEMIDs, in order to get the path members you have to step-through byte-by-byte according to each SHITEMID size - ID3's are composed the same way: basically a supremely royal PITA just to do something any 3-year-old understands the face-value of, but built in such a Byzantine fashion as to flummox even the most ardent of civilian contractors. :evil:

Even I am not feeling that masochistic today. Maybe tomorrow. :D

It's easier to just tag one's collection properly in the first bloody place!

(See? You probably thought no one ever read those old blogs of yours anymore, did you? My motto - "Know thy enemy" :wink:)
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

Post by dunno »

Kilmatead wrote: It's easier to just tag one's collection properly in the first bloody place!
Now that is a can of worms which should only be opened if you don't mind being named a "orifice".

Back in the day, ( a long long time ago in a......never mind), I initially ripped my music collection with Audio Grabber, only to discover that it wasn't "Uber kosher", re-ripped entire collection to some obscure german standard which at the time I resented intensely, but I'm now very grateful for having "ripped and tagged" properly, it looks so "NICE", then again OCD is my middle name.
Titles All Big caps, American way, or English way with improper nouns small caps.
No leading zero's in track numbers.
Various to be titled Atrist/Title
Discopgarphy (Disc #) and not [Disc 1], or (Disk 01) or [DISK 1] or DISK 01 or DISK, etc.....

I should've ripped my collection to FLAC, but HD's of large capacity were very very expensive, so compromise, hence EAC & LAMEv3.90.3 --aps, and my ears couldn't discern a difference between FLAC and --aps.

Album art was a luxury, no such thing as grab it off the net, I balked at scanning my entire collection so didn't include album art in my metadata or folders, many years later, my typing monkeys in the basement had long since deserted me, I thought that cover art in F2K would look nice, so between bouts of intense philosophising with various flavours of Rum I manually grabbed cover art from the "Wuh Wuh Wuh", copious quantities of alcohol didn't numb the pain/brain of that drudgery, NEVER AGAIN.

In those days few DAP's could support album art, anyone remember the archos jukebox players, tiny pixelated screens, and including Cover art in the metadata made some players "barf" the file, heck even Replay gain metadata used to make some players "barf", and musicmatch metadata did make rockbox "barf", fortunately the nice dev's at rockbox fixed it pronto.

Will I embed Cover art within metadata, only if hell freezes over.

Ah the "good ol days", you young 'uns have no idea.
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

Post by nikos »

say you have a folder which is a rip of album X. Isn't it a waste of space putting the images in each and every tune? The "90's" simple image solution is much better
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Re: blog: script for finding music folders without art

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nikos wrote:Isn't it a waste of space putting the images in each and every tune?
Well, if you insist upon needing a high-rez scan of Sgt. Pepper's to be able to personally differentiate between Fred Astaire, Carl Jung, and H.G. Wells - yes - but an ordinary thumbnail is rendered in just a few Kb - not really enough to offend your run-of-the-mill 8GB phone memory. :shrug: Besides, I was thinking more where freeloaders call over to see what you have in your Music/Film collection and just copy stuff willy-nilly onto a USB stick - nobody takes full albums anymore, they're just drunk and want to listen to the end of Clapton's Layla over and over until they pass out.

You mean Greek neighbours are more polite about this sort of thing and actually take stuff in a civilised, organised manner? :shock:

Apparently all your friends play croquette whereas all mine play hurling (where the only rule seems to be to swing clubs at other people's skulls as many times as possible in a match). :shrug: These kind of people have the eyesight of a rusty tractor and couldn't tell the difference between a 20Kb thumbnail and a 400MB Caravaggio render.
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