Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[forbigd]

Hi All:
I wanted to share a complicated, yet satisfying process.
I have a several folders of DTS files that are part of a big set, like “Hits of…x”, where the songs all have the same cover image. We are talking thousands of songs over several folders.
I have enjoyed playing with the visualizer studio, and have created a nice display that maximizes the use of cover art. Unfortunately whenever I play one of these files, I get the same boring “compilation style” cover art. I am really tired of that pic. 
I set off trying to get real covers. Since the ALBUM name is all the same, most scrapers just can’t deal with it. I tried removing the album name and just left it ARTIST-NAME, but that failed most the time too. I played with the musicbrainz app. It got some, but really liked Best Ofs, and other compilations.
Searching here and trying lots of options in MC, here is what I did:

First I had MC do a “Get Artist images from Last FM”. I then used Rename/Move/Copy Files to copy each file into a directory named for the artist. I then had a set of folders, all artist named, with 1 to 5 songs in each folder.
I then grabbed the artist images created earlier from
C:\Users\Me\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 21\Cover Art\Artists, remembering it is a hidden set of folders and I needed to check “Show Hidden Folders”. I copied them to a new folder for safety. The artist images all have weird extensions so I first renamed them all so they were now “artist name.jpg”. I then imported that folder into MC. I then did the same trick used earlier to R/M/C the files into folders named for the artist. Then I had MC rename the files from artist.jpg to folder.jpg.
I now have a bunch of folders all named an artist name and each having files inside by the artist, not tagged as belonging to the artists discography, but tagged as part of the collection it came from. And I have a set of folders named the artist name, with folder.jpgs of the artist in each one. Not a particular album cover art, but a real photo of the artist. Since these are special DTS files and duplicates of songs in real complete albums in MC, having an artist photo, rather than some “best of” cover is really nice. Then I simply copied one set into the other, so all the folder.jpgs would fall into the folders with the music files in it. Then I imported the resulting one set of folders. Lastly I had MC “Quick find in File/Cover Art Directory” so it embedded the new folder.jpg into the tag.

I wanted to share my experiment and it’s success in case someone else wants the same thing.
The pictures could be of a higher res, but they are still much better than the same bland compilation cover.
I found the key info I needed right here in the forums. So thanks!

Don