INTERACT FORUM
More => Old Versions => Media Center 13 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: mlagase on November 05, 2008, 06:28:12 pm
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I've been looking for a way to create a smartlist for showing cover art sizes that are less than X size, but cannot seem to find a way to do this. Is this actually written somewhere in each file or is it enumerated each time the file is accessed?
It sure would be nice to be able to create such playlist so that I don't have to search for coverart on a large music library. I could be here for weeks trying to go through each and every one just to determine that the size is less than what I wanted.
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Good to see that it's not just a problem I had. After the stretch function was added to cover art, I had to go through my whole collection last time I looked for bad cover art.
I'm glad today, because it was alot of the coverart that had acceptable quality in my library, but there was alot bigger and better ones in the database. It took alot of hours though.
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The cover art size is not in the database, so to get dimensions we must load the image and/or read the tag.
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Bump. I second the request! Can we be given another column view which shows the dimensions of embedded cover art? It would really help figuring out which albums need updating.
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Not a perfect solution, but if you also store your cover art as folder.jpg alongside your tracks you can find all of these files is your library (via Windows explorer) and view the size there. Obviously this only helps if all tracks correctly use the same cover art.
I agree that it'd be nice if MC could do this internally.
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Explorer method doesn't work for me as I keep songs Folder organized by Artist, not Album... too many subfolders that way.
Media Center is capable of keeping so much information in its database, lyrics, category, etc.
It seems like cover art dimensions shouldn't be that difficult to add in. Just my two cents. What do the programmers think?
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If the cover art files are on the disk it is possible to import them as individual library items, like any other images.
Inside the library they can be organized by folder path, dimensions, file size, etc. You can create a playlist or smartlist of the images that don't match your criteria and use that list for determining which image files should be replaced.
If you don't want to import them to your main library you can create a new library just for the cover art files. Alternatively you could create a new view that shows only the cover art files and exclude them from the views that show other images. The inclusion/exclusion can be done by several ways (folder path, a library field value, etc)
I have imported (and tagged) my cover art files since 2004. I have custom views that can show the audio files and the related image files together (often I have also images of the back cover, booklet pages, CD, etc.)
EDIT
I just noticed that echamp1 mentioned embedded art. The system I explained does not work with embedded images. That is one of the reasons why I don't use embedded cover art.
However, MC13 has a tool that can move cover art according to the set options. It should be able to save all cover art images to a defined folder in addition to keeping them inside the audio files' tags. When the image files are saved to a single folder they are named using the [Album Artist (auto)] - [Album] rule. That should give enough information for finding out which albums have bad quality cover art when the cover art files are inspected inside MC.
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Well... that's one workaround...
Although, a workaround is not a fix. Don't get me wrong, I like that idea, and I'll use it in the time being. However, it isn't a big time saver and it is definitely not the most efficient method. Honestly, how difficult would it be to program a new column field that displays art dimensions?
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I am not against the idea. It is good, but I have no idea how difficult it would be to implement. Currectly there is no library field for the cover art size and also a reader component would be needed. Probably such a component would act when new cover art is attached so the old files would not automatically get the "cover art size" values.
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Here's an older thread about the same topic:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=45868
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A third party solution is now available: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=51556.0 (Thanks, Mr ChriZ!)