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[slikvik]

Hi,

I think that cover art downloads for compilations do not work properly (unfortunately this includes KingSpartas as well.)

I have had a 90% failiure rate on these albums. Heres an example:

I have 'Acoustic' a compilation album. What I get is 'Acoustic' by John Lennon.

The first track on the Acoustic compilation is Badly Drawn Boy, so doing a search in amazon for 'Badly Drawn Boy Acoustic' will return zero (He doesn't have an album called Acoustic'.

So it then searches just on 'Acoustic', where I get this result...
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index%3Dmusic%26field-keywords%3Dacoustic%26store-name%3Dmusic/002-4942053-5208039

My album is the second one, but John Lennons is first and thats what I get the cover art for.

If I do a search for 'Various Artists Acoustic'...tadaa...I get my Album.

That is why I asked on a previous thread if we could use the term Various Artists in:

Folder name (instead of Assorted!)
Panes (instead of Multiple Artists!)
Album Artist tag (instead of Blank!) - An option to auto fill this with 'Various Artists' if Album Artist(Auto) equals True, would be nice.

There is no consistancy...and the one term which 99% of the world use (Various Artists) is not used anywhere.

If these were changed and the cover art downloaders used the Album Artist tag instead of Artist, this whole problem would go away.

There are some other nice repercussions of these changes like being able to have Various Artists listed in Theatre View etc.

Please look into this for us and let me have your comments.

Kind Regards

Vic

[Matt]

Good point -- consistency is good.

The tricky thing for us is that changing things like this can be frustrating for people using the old system unless we write migration tools.  Making migration tools can turn a simple change into a really complicated change.

Anyone else have an opinion?

[T2Mac]

I agree. I think that both the album folder and Album Artist (auto) field should use the same term, and I personally prefer 'Various Artists' as this does appear to be the most common term used on compilation albums.

Why not have these as user defined options where users can enter their own choice of text to be used? This way everyone is happy.  

[slikvik]

Hi,

I think it all flows in the following order:

Add an option in Library Tools to 'Fill in Album Artist Tag'. This will take the info from AlbumArtist(AUTO) and add it to Album Artist (adding Various Artist if it is one.) This shouldn't cause historic problems. It's just a nice option. After all, when you rip a CD it fills in the Artist Tag, so why not Album Artist (it makes sense.)

With this done, the Cover Art Downloader can look for Album Artist + Album Name first. If Album Artist is blank, revert back to Artist. This will not cause historic problems, it just improves the accuracy of the search.

Panes changing to Various artists shouldn't cause an issue as it's just what people click on to change a view, I don't think its directly linked to any third party tools or particular ways of using MC11.

Folder Name. That could be an issue. I'm a heavy user of MC11 and changing one folder name that contains 30 albums to Various Artists wouldn't cause me many issues. I can't speak for anyone else.

What do you think.

[KingSparta]

(unfortunately this includes KingSpartas as well.)

I am working on something new

[slikvik]

Thanks King,

I look forward to see what you are working on! (Filling in the Album Artist tag is the one thing out of this whole discussion that would take me hours to do manually!)

Matt,

Any thoughts on some of these changes?

Regards

Vic

[cascius]

Well, I just wanted to add a little thought:

Amazon.com can be quite limited as far as foreign CDs are concerned. Amazon.fr (france) seems to have the same basic database as .COM + a lot more international titles. The database system is basically the same. You can browse to an album on the .COM site, change the .FR and get to the equivalent french page of the album. This has worked very time I tried it in the past. Because we're dealing with cover arts, the fact that it's the site is in French doesn't matter.

So I see a few options that could be of interest:
- simply change amazon.com to amazon.fr
- add the option to switch automatically from one to the other
- add the option to choose manualy between the two sites.

-Cascius

[KingSparta]

Amazon.com can be quite limited as far as foreign CDs are concerned

my plug-in searches Amazon.de first then Amazon.com, then wal-Mart, then another

i have never seen anything on .fr and was not on .de

if you have let me know what it is

[cascius]

Amazon.com can be quite limited as far as foreign CDs are concerned

my plug-in searches Amazon.de first then Amazon.com, then wal-Mart, then another

i have never seen anything on .fr and was not on .de

if you have let me know what it is

Sounds great! I didn't know your plugin did that already. I'm sure that .DE or .FR share a fairly similar database.

Good job,

-Cascius

[LonWar]

I have a feeling, that this new plug in will be 1 of his greatest work!

 

[KingSparta]

I have a feeling, that this new plug in will be 1 of his greatest work!

 

the new plug-in only searches my site, (hardly any art on it now) but when i release the plug-in and users use it, art will be added to the server.

a picture of the new plug-in is in the developers forum.

a few people have a copy of it for testing.

I do have a problem with the EZFTP.OCX i am using i have the programmer looking at it. if The Media Center SDK Had FTP Upload\Download I Would Use That, But i had to use a cheap FTP OCX. i could not aford a $900 FTP control (that was not the high priced one) for a free plug-in.