Sources for album art - a primer by FJ

[Fat-Johnny]

(This is a repost of information hidden in another thread at www.virtualmusicjukebox.com)

There has been a lot of talk about sources for quality, reasonably sized album art.  There are a lot of choices out there, and I'd just like to share my personal experience.

In the beginning, I started getting covers (album art), from the bevy of hack/crack/warez sites around the net.  There are two drawbacks to these:
1) Sometimes hard to navigate, lotsa pop-ups, they want you to "register", etc..
2) The covers are SO big, that it takes a supercomputer just to run VMJ.

These cracks/warez sites have been disappearing very rapidly lately, and so I was forced to find an alternate site.  I started to get the covers from www.amazon.com and they looked pretty good to me.  However, when VMJ blows them up (Interactive mode), they do look a little grainy.  Soon ater that, I found www.buy.com, and their covers seem to be the best of the bunch.  Better size (500x500), and reasonable file size (~100kb).  Since that discovery, my hierarchy of downloads always has been:
1) buy.com
2) walmart.com
3) amazon.com
If none of those three have it, I usually go to a Google image search http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=

Lets compare.  I picked a fairly popular album right now (50 Cent):
1) At www.buy.com, the picture is 500x500 pixels, 96dpi, 24-bit color, for a file size of 103kb.


2) At www.walmart.com, the picture is 500x500 pixels, 72dpi, 24-bit color, for a file size of 56kb


3) At www.amazon.com, the picture is 300x297 pixels, 96dpi, 24-bit color, for a file size of 27kb




Let your own eyes be the judge.  I guess what I am saying is, if you are gonna take the time to download all of these covers, at least get the best ones you can easily get.  For my money, I'd go to buy.com

My $0.02,
FJ

[papaschtroumpf]

Thanks, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Anyone has an "automated" way to retrieve the pictures by any chance?

[Fat-Johnny]

Anyone has an "automated" way to retrieve the pictures by any chance?

I don't have an automated way, and I really dont think that it is possible.  I mean, how would any software know which album cover to go get off of buy.com, or amazon??

It really isnt that bad.  the 'work' comes when you first start collecting.  You have all of these albums that you have ripped over the years, but never even thought of getting cover art for, so you have like 300 albums ahead of you.

I guess the way Musicmatch looks up album art "automatically" at CDDB is sorta an automated way, but the images at CDDB are like 25x25 thumbnails.  Not exactly sufficient for VMJ.

After the initial motherlode of a job, it really isnt that bad.  When you set up your PC to rip, while it is ripping a CD to MP3, take that time to go to buy.com and get the cover art.  By the time your ripper finishes the first song, and creates the directory for the album, you will have found the cover, and can save it right to the appropriate folder.  Takes about 15-20 seconds to get one .jpg, and if you save it directly to the appropriate folder, you eliminate the hassle of finding it afterwards (probably in C:\My documents\my pictures) and then having to copy it to the right place, rename it, etc..   Download it right the first time!

Another thing to consider:  I know that some people name their album art "50_cent_get_rich_or_die_trying.jpg".  To keep it simple, I just use the name "cover.jpg".  The main reason I do this is because there are other jukebox programs out there that are worth using, and I know of at least two of these that NEEDED the album art to be named "cover.jpg".  One was ApeJukebox, and the other I cant remember.  Most other programs dont care of the name, they just look for a .jpg in the folder, but Ape definitely wants it to be named "cover.jpg"   Why not make all of the programs happy by naming it "cover.jpg"??

Right now, I am at about 580 or so.  Have fun,
FJ

[SirPoonga]

You can interface with wmp or realjukebox to get cover art.  HowardC has been doing that.

[soslo]

fat johnny - would you be willing to zip up the covers you have and mail them to me? I can host them on my site. Perhaps people can add their pics too and we can have one main zip to download that will grow over time...

[neo_virus]

Hey I found this a while ago. I think it was recommended here. Anyway there is a program that you can use to search for album covers, its called Gotcha Covered http://www.gotchacoveredonline.com/. Basically you select the folder of the album you want the cover for and it uses the folder name for the seach parameters and searches Buy.com, Amazon.com and Walmart.com for the cover. You then just have to tick the box and click download cover.

Hope it helps

[AgniTheSane]

This is also worth a look for grabbing covers:

http://bluedragontavern.dyndns.org/albumgrabber/index.html

I have not used it though

[filenabber]

Here's the one I use. It's free and works great.
http://kempele.fi/~skyostil/projects/albumart/

Brian
--
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