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[Frobozz]

I was doing some album art lookups and had an idea.  Media Center does audio fingerprinting and saves the track info in YADB.  What about doing album art lookups based on the fingerprint of the track/album?  Yeah, it might cause a lot of false hits.  But for some music genres (like classical) it could be very useful.  A problem with classical is that artist and title is inconsistent.  Different people do the artist and album title info very differently.  No two people will enter the same data.  So album art lookups based on artist and album title are hopeless.  Lookups based on fingerprint data could possibly get useful hits.

[MrC]

How would this work?  You can't just use the fingerprint from one track, as numerous album variants have the same track, but different artwork.  So, you'd have to use all tracks.  But then again, a number of albums have the same set of tracks, but different artwork altogether.  Perhaps this is just an insignificant minority?

I think it would be useful to allow users to modify/specify the search criteria for artwork lookups.  This would help in the cases such as you describe, and others as well.

[Frobozz]

I don't know how it would work.  I'm just floating an idea.

JRiver has a tremendous resource in the YADB fingerprint data.  It would be nice to be able to put that to use in album art lookups.

I don't know how accurate the fingerprint data is or how well it is able to identify a particular album.  I know very little about the fingerprinting methods that JRiver uses and I don't think they've given out any details publicly.  In classical music we've got budget labels that are reissuing old recordings and combining them into new albums.  Even labels like Telarc are combining some of their older recordings as double albums at more budget prices.  Things like that would likely trip up the fingerprinting and cause false hits for album art.  Not perfect, but better than getting zero hits.

Right now with my classical music I only get hits on the album art that I have submitted.  The album art I have submitted matches my artist and album title naming scheme and comes up with hits for my own album art.  But I get zero hits on any other album art for classical music.  Zero.  The only practical solution is to somehow make use of the fingerprinting data.  And I'm not sure how real world practical that is.

[bunglemebaby]

How would this work?

It would probably work just like MusicIP and MusicBrainz. From my understanding of the MusicIP method and what the MC Analyze Audio does, this type of lookup isn't possible with JR's AA data. I could certainly be wrong about JR's finger print data though.

The thing that something like MusicBrainz has that YADB does not have is manual interaction. There is a whole slew of people working to keep correct metadata attached to the correct audio finger prints. With MC's current user base there's just no way to keep up with all that data. So JR would have to figure out a way to correctly automate everything based on some complex system of rules used to compound information from everybody's music libraries.

I certainly like the idea of this, but somebody way smarter than me is going to have to put their thinking cap on very tight to make it feasible.

-JB

[drc]

I saw your thread on album art...maybe you can point me in the right direction.  I'm trying to update my music database in MC-14.  The YADB simply comes back "nothing found."

Is there a way to point to another database like Discogs.  With all the improvements to Media Center...this should have been an easy upgrade.

Manually, will not get it... and transfer my files to window media player, updating, then losing some of the data in transferring back...is tiring.

Any suggestions.

[bunglemebaby]

Is there a way to point to another database like Discogs.  With all the improvements to Media Center...this should have been an easy upgrade.

There's no way to change the database that "Get From Internet" (album artwork) connects to, and as such no way to do bulk album art lookups (within MC) from any other source besides YADB.

One automated option is a program called Mp3Tag. It has a few other sources available for automatic Album Art lookup and it won't mess with any tags you don't want it to (like WMP does for you). You can drag n' drop files from MC into Mp3Tag, and then "Update Library From Tags" once Mp3Tag has added artwork.  Others can give you more thorough details on this, I don't use the program for album art.

Personally, I use a Google Images search from the links bar to search for album art. It's manual and you can only do one album at a time, but I find it to be the best way to get high quality art, with 0 mis-hits. (I've gotten some pretty strange auto album art results, from many sources). Let me know if you're interested in how to set this up, it's pretty easy. You could also make a Discogs specific link for an album.

So, there's no "perfect" solution for you, but there are pretty good, workable options.

-JB