Print

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

[baldo]

Being an older user, I remember looking at my LP or CD shelf and just picking a LP/CD to play that I had not played in ages.

While I love the convenience of MC and having everything on a Hard drive, I would like to recreate the expereince of just browsing through my collection.

So how can I print out my entire library of tracks and Albums with the album art, maybe into something like a catalogue format.

I was thinking of creating a series of playlist and then perhaps modifying the view characteristics but that's just a  guess. I need some way to do this in bulk since I have about 20,000 or so tracks/albums in my library. So doing it manually is not really an option.

I really have no idea on how to tackle this issue so I would welcome any thoughts.

Thanks for your help in advance.

[Moe]

MCUtils has a script called MakeCatalog that I believe will do exactly what you're looking for. 

If you have a hard time getting things up and running the creator of the script (MrC) email be found in the docs.

[baldo]

thanks for this.

I am not a coder so is there and instruction manual that I can read or watch that can walk me through what I need to do so that I can create my custom catalogue.

[Moe]

There is a manual at the download location. If you need any assistance contact MrC, he will get you up and running he's very helpful and friendly as well.

[HPBEME]

Have you tried using MC's built-in Cover View?  You can find it in the view menu, or just press CTRL+5 to launch it. 

This is my absolute favorite way of browsing my collection of artists/albums - when I come across cover art that stirs my soul, I just hit play.  While not exactly like flipping through albums on a shelf back in the day, it is at least similar, and in-arguably easier... just scroll your mouse wheel! 

The key is to adjust the picture slider to substantially increase the cover art size.  I've spent way more hours than I care to admit collecting high-resolution album covers and artist images for just this purpose… to display my high-res "art" (an accurate description for many album covers and artist portraits) that fully fills up my 65 inch display. I find it extremely gratifying.  The attached pictures show artist pictures and album covers at different size levels. 

I am guessing you still prefer to print out the images so you can "physically hold" hold them in your hands (and I get that), but perhaps others reading this might appreciate the MC cover view approach.

[HPBEME]

Here is a picture with the album art increased to an extreme size where only two albums are visible at a time.  Obviously, the album art itself needs to be very high fidelity for it to be this large and still clear.

[baldo]

I have looked at the  cover art view, but it is still on a screen. 

You are right that I would prefer to have something printed out.  Something along the lines of Artists - Albums, Tracks, Genres plus any other information that I would like to see.

It would be nice to have something while sitting on the sofa or where -ever.

I have seen that I have about 35,000 tracks, not exactly sure how many albums that is, but we are talking about a lot of tracks.

[JimH]

Have you tried using one of the remotes [wiki]?  You can browse on a phone or tablet or notebook PC, then play on your TV.

[markf2748]

So how can I print out my entire library of tracks and Albums with the album art, maybe into something like a catalogue format.

How are you storing your album art?  Personally, I store all album art images side-by-side in the same album folder as the associated audio files (I also load them into the flac files).  Each image is tagged with basic audio information: album, artist, date, date acquired, Last Played (album).

Side-by-side storage enables me to easily manage the images and create Image Views dedicated to album art, each view synchronized in some way to the audio.  Once the files are available in an Image View, the album art can be selected and then printed out in a wide variety of page formats using MC's File > Print Images ... facility.

I have not felt a need to print so far, but it is an interesting idea.  It would be labor intensive for a large collection if you have to manually select individual images.  However if the folder structure stores only the images you want to print, or you have a way for MC to filter the view for them, then selecting and printing is very straightforward.  I think this scheme would fulfill your base requirement to physically page through printed album covers.

I do not know of a way to automatically combine images with text information such as album name, artist name, track titles, etc.  But MC text alone can easily be printed out separately after copy/paste into a custom spreadsheet (in Excel for example).

Reference @David Sydney: https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,135638.msg939805.html#msg939805