Slimserver and Artwork

sunshinedawg · « **on:** 2 Jul 2006, 12:07 am »

I am starting to get around to putting cover art in my Flac folders. I went to the interface page of slimserver and it says all art files have to be named something like cover.jpg. Am I unsderstanding this correctly? It seems very silly to me to have all of my artwork have the same file name. Is there anyway to have a wildcard like *.jpg ? You should probably be able to have multiple image formats as well(ie bmp).

ebag4 · « **Reply #1 on:** 2 Jul 2006, 12:25 am »

You put the artwork for each album (cover.jpg) in the same folder your flac files are in so each album folder will not only have "songtitle".flac files for each song but also cover.jpg for that album as well.

sunshinedawg · « **Reply #2 on:** 2 Jul 2006, 01:21 am »

Yeah, but I don't want to name every file "cover.jpg". I want to name them something like "Led Zeppelin.jpg" Is thereany way I can have slimserver display a file with anyname that has jpg extension?

jakepunk · « **Reply #3 on:** 2 Jul 2006, 02:35 am »

You can't make it use *.jpg, but clicking on Server Settings -> Interface shows instructions for how to use the percent wildcard to do what you want it to do. The example shows "%ARTIST - ALBUM.jpg" which is one of the formats listed under Server Settings -> Formatting -> Title Format. I haven't tried it, but that would mean naming your image "Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV.jpg". You can add your own format in the Title Format section if you want. The file must be a jpeg, though.

sunshinedawg · « **Reply #4 on:** 2 Jul 2006, 03:19 am »

Ok, thanks. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't overlooking something. I see how the wild card works now. I guess I'm just going to have a million files called cover.jpg I know they will each be in their own folder, but I just don't like it!

nelamvr6 · « **Reply #5 on:** 2 Jul 2006, 05:17 am »

Hey, you can try it, but my experience says that if it isn't named "cover.jpg" Slimserver won recognize it.

Of course, that's just my experience, YMMV.

Eli · « **Reply #6 on:** 6 Jul 2006, 11:22 pm »

Quote from: jakepunk on 2 Jul 2006, 02:35 am

You can't make it use *.jpg, but clicking on Server Settings -> Interface shows instructions for how to use the percent wildcard to do what you want it to do. The example shows "%ARTIST - ALBUM.jpg" which is one of the formats listed under Server Settings -> Formatting -> Title Format. I haven't tried it, but that would mean naming your image "Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV.jpg". You can add your own format in the Title Format section if you want. The file must be a jpeg, though.

Keep in my that Windows has a number of illegal characters that can't be used in file names. The characters are \/:*?"<>|. If you had an album tagged, for instance, with an album name of Getz/Gilberto, you'll have to fall back to using one of the predefined file names for the artwork. If you fiddle with this long enough (and I have) you soon realize that it makes life a lot easier to just use a single standard file name for all covers.

Tim S · « **Reply #7 on:** 4 Sep 2006, 08:10 pm »

I am looking into how to set all of this up and the one thing I can't find is how to even get the .jpg's without scanning them myself. Is there a place like freedb for getting these? How does everyone else get them? Thanks.

Tim

JoshK · « **Reply #8 on:** 4 Sep 2006, 09:00 pm »

I paid for music collector (collectorz.com) which then pulls the covers from amazon.com after you plop the cd in the drive (or buy their scanner to scan the barcodes). This then saves all the *.jpgs to your HD (and you can copy them from there).

chadh · « **Reply #9 on:** 4 Sep 2006, 10:09 pm »

I wish I could remember where I found this (maybe a thread on Head-Fi?), but I know I used some free software that (i) scanned your music collection on your hard drive; (ii) for each album found would search Amazon (in the US, in Japan and in the UK) for cover art; (iii) would present all covers that were appropriate, so you could select your favourite; and (iv) would save the cover art in the right folder for you. Everything was automated. It was wonderful. Now I can't remember where it was. I think it must have been either on Head-Fi, or else on the Foobar site. It was almost certainly set up for Foobar use, so it may or may not save the files with the right name for Slimserver use.

It wasn't perfect - it failed to find a bunch of albums. But I probably had to search for artwork for less than 5% of my albums.

I'll see if I can find the appropriate information later this evening.

Chad

gitarretyp · « **Reply #10 on:** 5 Sep 2006, 12:08 am »

If you run linux, the amarok player will fetch cover art for you from amazon based on the tracks on your hard disk. I'm sure there's a jukebox style program in windows that would perform a similar function.

TCM · « **Reply #11 on:** 5 Sep 2006, 12:25 pm »

Quote from: chadh on 4 Sep 2006, 10:09 pm

I wish I could remember where I found this (maybe a thread on Head-Fi?), but I know I used some free software that (i) scanned your music collection on your hard drive; (ii) for each album found would search Amazon (in the US, in Japan and in the UK) for cover art; (iii) would present all covers that were appropriate, so you could select your favourite; and (iv) would save the cover art in the right folder for you. Everything was automated. It was wonderful. Now I can't remember where it was. I think it must have been either on Head-Fi, or else on the Foobar site. It was almost certainly set up for Foobar use, so it may or may not save the files with the right name for Slimserver use.

It wasn't perfect - it failed to find a bunch of albums. But I probably had to search for artwork for less than 5% of my albums.

I'll see if I can find the appropriate information later this evening.

Chad

Maybe you mean this [ http://team.thenexusnet.com/nexus/AAA/ ]? I use it and it works fine. The only problem is my swedish cd:s which I have to fix manually most of the times.

/Håkan

Tim S · « **Reply #12 on:** 5 Sep 2006, 12:27 pm »

That one looks great. I'll give it a try.

Tim

nathanm · « **Reply #13 on:** 5 Sep 2006, 02:30 pm »

Anyone care to post a screengrab of where this cover art is supposed to show up? I assume it only applies to the web browser interface, correct? I have a few cover.jpgs in the folders and thought I had the preference checked, but I have never seen a cover show up in the browser.

TCM · « **Reply #14 on:** 5 Sep 2006, 03:19 pm »

Quote from: nathanm on 5 Sep 2006, 02:30 pm

Anyone care to post a screengrab of where this cover art is supposed to show up? I assume it only applies to the web browser interface, correct? I have a few cover.jpgs in the folders and thought I had the preference checked, but I have never seen a cover show up in the browser.

In the "default apperance start window" just click "Browse Artwork"

nathanm · « **Reply #15 on:** 5 Sep 2006, 06:09 pm »

Thanks! Ahh I see, I must've missed the "Browse Artwork" part. I will have to try that. I was expecting to see them in a different screen I guess, like when you click on a certain album I figured the thumbnail would show up underneath the list of songs.

Tim S · « **Reply #16 on:** 5 Sep 2006, 07:11 pm »

The album cover should also show up when playing a song and when looking at the list of songs. At least I think it did when I was testing it out yesterday. It definitely did when I used the Nokia 770 skin but I guess it might not have with the normal one. Even using it on the computer I liked the Nokia skin better anyway.

Tim

chadh · « **Reply #17 on:** 6 Sep 2006, 01:19 am »

Quote from: TCM on 5 Sep 2006, 12:25 pm

Quote from: chadh on 4 Sep 2006, 10:09 pm

I wish I could remember where I found this (maybe a thread on Head-Fi?), but I know I used some free software that (i) scanned your music collection on your hard drive; (ii) for each album found would search Amazon (in the US, in Japan and in the UK) for cover art; (iii) would present all covers that were appropriate, so you could select your favourite; and (iv) would save the cover art in the right folder for you. Everything was automated. It was wonderful. Now I can't remember where it was. I think it must have been either on Head-Fi, or else on the Foobar site. It was almost certainly set up for Foobar use, so it may or may not save the files with the right name for Slimserver use.

It wasn't perfect - it failed to find a bunch of albums. But I probably had to search for artwork for less than 5% of my albums.

I'll see if I can find the appropriate information later this evening.

Chad

Maybe you mean this [ http://team.thenexusnet.com/nexus/AAA/ ]? I use it and it works fine. The only problem is my swedish cd:s which I have to fix manually most of the times.

/Håkan

Awesome. That's the very software I was looking for. Thanks Håkan.

Chad

gitarretyp · « **Reply #18 on:** 6 Sep 2006, 02:27 am »

I looked around a bit this afternoon and found this crossplatform cover art grabber Album Art. It works well in linux, anyway.

nathanm · « **Reply #19 on:** 6 Sep 2006, 05:46 am »

Quote from: TCM

In the "default apperance start window" just click "Browse Artwork"

That link wasn't showing up for me. My problem was that in my quest for speed I had this set: Home: Server Settings: Performance: Look For Artwork: Do not look for artwork (that'll do it!) After correcting that it allowed art to show up when viewing an album by itself, but then "browse artwork" still showed nothing. Cleared browser cache and then it worked.

Makes sense I suppose.