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Topic: Album Art Downloader XUI (Read 2035292 times) previous topic - next topic
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Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2275
AAD 0.46 wants to downgrade some scripts when I check for updates.


Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2277
Thanks for keeping AAD up-to-date!

@benjy31: Yes it is.
audiophile // flac & wavpack, mostly // using too many audio players

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2278
Anyway, what you might want to try is using the "Always download full size" checkbox for the sources you use, rather than the background automatic full image downloading. That way the source won't bother with a thumbnail and just go straight for the full size image, so when the progress bar reports search completion, it will be the full size image that's available.


So... to make sure I understand.

If I check "Always" for "Automatically download full-size images" in the main options box that is when it will do it in the background AFTER it downloads the thumbnail from the source.

If however, I use the "Always download full size" on the source itself them it won't bother to download a thumbnail at all and will go straight to the full size image.

I assumed that doing the first was a shortcut for doing the second on all sources.

Can you confirm that I understand?  Thanks!

Matt

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2279
Can you confirm that I understand?  Thanks!

Yes, you've got it. Now that you put it like that, I can see why it could be confusing. I might see if I can come up with some better wording for the UI, or at least some explanatory tooltips...

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2280
Alex, great program and I haven't thank you for your hard work in some time. Just started using it again and have a couple of requests:

- Option to always display current artwork at the top: Helpful when trying to update low resolution artwork

- Fanart.tv search script

Thanks again!

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2281
I had a look at fanart.tv, thanks for the suggestion. Unless I'm missing something, though, there doesn't actually appear to be any way of searching for an album on it... the only thing I can do is search for an artist or a label. I can't find an Advanced Search or anything like that, and even if I could use the API (which I can't, as it needs a key), the API doesn't have any search function either!

For your other request, if you want to keep existing artwork available for comparison, then the best way to do it is to right click on it and choose "Preview". This will open another window showing that artwork that you can leave open while you look at other results.

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2282
Regarding fanart.tv, a modified google search would probably suffice, simply adding either fanart.tv or site:fanart.tv to the google search search. This is what I do manually.


For your other request, if you want to keep existing artwork available for comparison, then the best way to do it is to right click on it and choose "Preview". This will open another window showing that artwork that you can leave open while you look at other results.

Alex


Typically what I am trying to do is update art, that I have at lower resolution. Usually this doesn't show up because I have the limits set to not show results (including local search) below a certain level, and even if it did show it ends up buried with the other results at the bottom.

I would like to have it listed at the top as "Current Album Art" or something like that.


Also, is there a repository for older versions of AAD. I found back to .4 on SF but am looking for some older version.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2283

Hi, thanks for the further detail about your suggestion. I take your point about the filters ruling out your local sources, I can see why it might be useful to make those always show and ignore the filter settings. The best I can offer at the moment is if you set the Local Files Source as "Search First", then you can click Search once, click the button to toggle filters off, preview the image you want, then click Search a second time (it will now say Extend Search) to get all your other results. You can then toggle the filters back on. Not ideal, I know, but it might help.

You might also like to take a look at the system mneimeyer suggested earlier, that was implemented for 0.46: To use it, click ... in the Local Files Source then check the box in the options there. With this option turned on, whenever the Local Files source finds results, it turns on the Minimum Size filter with the minimum size set to be that of the largest result that it found. This means that you will only see the largest local file result, and any online results that are equal to or larger than that one.

Regarding the custom Google search, I'm afraid I've found out the hard way that these don't work well. The problem is if you have multiple sources all searching Google then you trigger their bot-detection algorithms, and they all stop working. So far, with just a single source searching Google it works OK, so I'm sticking with the generic Google search and not producing any custom ones. I'm happy to write scripts for new and interesting sites, but they do have to have their own search engines producing useful results.

For older versions of AAD, take a look in /album-art-xui/Older/ in the sourceforge page, pretty much all of them are there, back to about 0.7.

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2284
Instead of doing a second custom Google search could you do a bing search?

Another feature suggestion. On the save menu, add an option to rename existing art to folder(x).jpg, and save new item as folder.jpg


Also, how is the album art categorized? I have lots of albums with embedded artwork and folder.jpg. Usually the embedded art is smaller then the folder.jpg. So as I go through and update, I think I am updating albums with small artwork, and when I go to save the folder.jpg file, I find out I already have a large artwork there.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2285
Also, how is the album art categorized?

I'm not sure what you mean by categorized here. By default, the Local Files Source will search the path specified for saving the image file to see if there's already one there, and then search the same folder for any embedded images in any files. You can change this behaviour by editing the "Path to find images" box in the Local Files Source options. The default is %folder%\%filename%|%folder%\*<*> . The first part %folder%\%filename% instructs it to search for the target filename an image file would be saved to, and the second part, %folder%\*<*> instructs it to search the target folder for any files, and then any embedded image within each of those files. The <*> syntax is used to denote any embedded image within a file - you can also use a 0-based number to represent a specific image, so <0> would only return the first embedded image.

Once the results are shown in the list, you can choose to group either by Local, or by Source. In both cases, this will result in all the results from the Local Files Source being shown together in a group in the results. There is no further sub-grouping between embedded and non-embedded artwork, but you can tell by looking at the name of the result whether it was embedded or not.

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2286
Also, how is the album art categorized?

I'm not sure what you mean by categorized here.


I think I've run into what I think he means.

When you do your initial scan the column "Artwork Status" has something like "Found: Folder.jpg" but when there is embedded art it says something like "Found: track.mp3<1>" and the Dimensions (and Size?) column reflects that embedded artwork. So you don't know you have "physical" artwork just the embedded.

If this is what he means, then I agree, I was also never sure which AAD looked at first/last etc. (I personally remove all embedded artwork though...)

Also, in testing this I remembered you can't sort by the Artwork Status column beyond the Found. For example my test files are sorted:

  Found: 01 - AAA Test Track A.mp3<0>
  Found: 03 - AAA Test Track C.flac<0>
  Found: Folder.jpg
  Found: 02 - AAA Test Track B.m4a<0>

And they stay that way no matter how I click the Artwork Status column header to change the sort ascending or descending. (I would use this personally to find the lone BMP, PNG or other odd file format.)

Thanks again! I can't speak highly enough of AAD! It makes my life SOOO much easier!

Matt

P.S. While I'm wishing... any chance of a plugin that would submit the largest local artwork to Google Image search for use with the Visually Similar search? Sometimes the results are clearly picking up words from the auther and title and yet have nothing to do with my album. But the 200x200 image I'm trying to find a bigger version of I can plug into Google Image search manually and what I'm looking for comes right up. Or would that run afoul of your multiple google plugins "rule"?

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2287



Alex, I thought that would be confusing, so let me try to explain better.

When launching File Browser, AAD searches by library and identifies which albums have art. It searches for folder.jpg as well as embedded art. Then it displays the results, I sort by small art and search to replace those with low resolution art.

However, often what happens is that AAD says the art is 250x250, since it has identified the album art, but when I go to replace the art with new art, I find that a higher resolution file already exists as folder.jpg.

Basically, when sorting, I want to always sort based on the highest resolution art available, so that I am not trying to update albums that already have high resolution artwork.


P.S. While I'm wishing... any chance of a plugin that would submit the largest local artwork to Google Image search for use with the Visually Similar search? Sometimes the results are clearly picking up words from the auther and title and yet have nothing to do with my album. But the 200x200 image I'm trying to find a bigger version of I can plug into Google Image search manually and what I'm looking for comes right up. Or would that run afoul of your multiple google plugins "rule"?


I think you could get around this by having the option to right click on any image and search by image using Google Image search


Album Art Exchange
On another note, I know you were asked to remove Album Art Exchange a few years ago. As a work around, would it be possible to launch a browser based search of AAE? They clearly have the best art work, and I would be happy to go to my browser to look, but if some of the process can be automated that would be fantastic!

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2288
OK, I think I see where you both are coming from - I didn't get at first that you meant in the File Browser, Eli.

The way the File Browser works is that it will search for an image for the album, and as soon as it finds one, it stops looking. It was designed to find albums with no artwork, rather than to try and evaluate the quality of existing artwork. If you have it set to search using ID3 tags rather than a file path pattern, then as soon as it reads the tags of a file to determine artist and album, it will also read the image tag. If it finds one then that's it done for that album, it has artwork present, no more work required. If it didn't find one, or if you weren't using ID3 tag mode (so it won't have opened up the file to read tags at all - much quicker) then it queues up that album for searching for a matching external image file. That searching happens in a background thread while it continues to search for more albums. Once the search finds an image file matching the criteria for that album, then it stops looking too.

So, basically, the File browser isn't built to do what you want to do in providing a report on the best quality of artwork available for a given album. That's what the main search window is for, using the Local Files Source. That will keep searching and show you all the images available for the album, including all embedded artwork. You can then see what the highest resolution you have is, and check if there are any that are incorrect or poor quality for other reasons (bad scan, etc.). You could also use the Search First functionality to check out your local files before kicking off the internet search, as I described in a previous post.

At present, I don't intend to modify the File Browser to search all images for each result. If it ever were implemented, I would insist on it being an optional setting.

Google Visually Similar
This is interesting, but I'm struggling to see how it would fit in to AAD. Obviously it couldn't just be another Source, as those are searched by album and artist name. As, Eli suggests, you could have it as a right click command on an existing image that would launch a new search based just on that image, without searching other sources. It feels like a bit of a weird feature, though. In any case, given that Google seem to be quite protective of not offering an API for this, I'm not sure how practical the uploading of the existing image for searching would be. It be possible, I haven't tried it, but I wouldn't count on it!

I could add this as a feature request for the future.

Album Art Exchange
Sure, don't see why not. I can't think that they could object to having visitors pointed to their website in a browser. I won't be including it with the standard scripts as I don't think most AAD users would be happy with a browser window opening whenever they did a search, but if you are, have at it: album-art-exchange-browser-launcher.boo

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2289
Google Visually Similar
This is interesting, but I'm struggling to see how it would fit in to AAD. Obviously it couldn't just be another Source, as those are searched by album and artist name. As, Eli suggests, you could have it as a right click command on an existing image that would launch a new search based just on that image, without searching other sources.
Alex


I think where this fits is on albums with vague names that give non-specific searches. If you have correct, but low resolution art, using google image search can be a very helpful way to see if you have find the same art at higher resolutions. I use it all the time.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2290
I don't understand how I can use the regular search window to scan my entire library...

In the file broswer I would like to reformat the folder based search which is currently:

Code: [Select]
\%artist%\%album%\*


However, most of my library, while in the artist/album directory setup has additional unique identifiers after most, but not albums:

IE

Code: [Select]
Dinosaur Jr\You're Living All Over Me (10) (9A0BB60B)


where the first (XX) is the number of tracks, and the second (XXXXXXXX) is the CDDB ID. I do this so that if there are multiple versions of the same album they get unique folders. However, if i just use directory structure with the default code I get:

Artist:
Dinosaur Jr
Album:
You're Living All Over Me (10) (9A0BB60B)

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2291
Album Art Exchange
Sure, don't see why not. I can't think that they could object to having visitors pointed to their website in a browser. I won't be including it with the standard scripts as I don't think most AAD users would be happy with a browser window opening whenever they did a search, but if you are, have at it: album-art-exchange-browser-launcher.boo

Alex


Alex, thanks for being so amazingly fast with this. Unfortunately, for me it doesn't seem to do anything. Is there something I can change on my system or in the script? Do I need to point it to my browser? When it works, any sense if there is a way to get it to do new tabs, or will it always launch a new window.

Thanks again!

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2292
Hello Alex,

My original statement was "I don't understand why AAD and similar programs are necessary to access the site[/u]." I understand the purpose of the program itself    I am with you on the front covers only, until a month ago, this has been our primary focus. As an experiment we have been adding select back covers (sans track lists) and sleeves because some are quite beautiful.

If there were some way to only call up the browser page while not allowing direct access, I would be alright with that. I would of course want it to call a detail or gallery page with the result(s) and not the page with the image itself . For example:

http://www.albumartexchange.com/covers.php?id=74171
or
http://www.albumartexchange.com/covers.php...;bgc=&page= 

and never this: http://www.albumartexchange.com/gallery/im...wn-tasty_02.jpg

Cheers,
Scott


Alex, in regard to AAX script it looks like Scott did indeed give a go ahead for this very idea a few years back with the above request of returning gallery results and not the full size images.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2293
I think where this fits is on albums with vague names that give non-specific searches. If you have correct, but low resolution art, using google image search can be a very helpful way to see if you have find the same art at higher resolutions. I use it all the time.
I've added a feature request for this.

most of my library, while in the artist/album directory setup has additional unique identifiers after most, but not albums:
How about: \%artist%\%album%"(?: \(\d+\) \([\dA-F]+\))?"\*

That should ignore the bit at the end of the album folder so long as: it starts with a space, has a number in brackets, followed by a space, followed by a hex code (digits 0-9, A-F) in brackets.

[AAX browser launcher] doesn't seem to do anything. Is there something I can change on my system or in the script? Do I need to point it to my browser? When it works, any sense if there is a way to get it to do new tabs, or will it always launch a new window.
Hmm. Does it show any error message? Does the script show up in your list of sources? Can you launch a browser window through other links, for example by clicking on the (i) link in a search result? What the script does is simply tell windows to launch the given URL, the same as if you'd done Start, Run and pasted in the URL, or used a URL shortcut file. It should launch the default browser, and that browser will handle it however it is configured to do. I think Firefox can be configured to open new urls in tabs rather than windows, but I don't know about other browsers.

Alex, in regard to AAX script it looks like Scott did indeed give a go ahead for this very idea a few years back with the above request of returning gallery results and not the full size images.
Ah, nice find, some good thread archaeology there! That's good to know.

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2294
[AAX browser launcher] doesn't seem to do anything. Is there something I can change on my system or in the script?
Hmm. Does it show any error message? Does the script show up in your list of sources? Can you launch a browser window through other links, for example by clicking on the (i) link in a search result? What the script does is simply tell windows to launch the given URL, the same as if you'd done Start, Run and pasted in the URL, or used a URL shortcut file. It should launch the default browser, and that browser will handle it however it is configured to do. I think Firefox can be configured to open new urls in tabs rather than windows, but I don't know about other browsers.

Alex


Yes, the script shows up in my sources list.

No, clicking on the little (i) icons doesn't do anything on my system either.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2295
No, clicking on the little (i) icons doesn't do anything on my system either.

In that case, for some reason, AAD is unable to launch your browser. There are two possible reasons I can think of for this. One is that you do not have a default browser registered. It's a bit weird, but certainly possible - perhaps you un-installed a browser that used to be the default, and an existing browser wasn't re-set as the default. If you go to "Default Programs" from your start menu or control panel, then choose "Associate a file type or protocol with a specific program", and look near the bottom of that list for "HTTP", then see if it says it's associated with any browser or not. You could probably also do "Set program access and computer defaults" and "Choose a default web browser", but I'm not sure exactly how that works, or what it would show if none were currently default.

Anyway, if you are sure that you do have a default browser (you could also try Start, Run, then enter "http://www.example.com" or similar and see if that brings up a browser window), then something is actively preventing AAD from launching it. That would probably be some over-zealous security or protection software, usually bundled with an antivirus suite, that thinks allowing programs to launch web browsers is too risky and should be prevented.

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2296
OK, got it working! You rock Alex!

Now I have another feature request ;-)

The ability to drag and drop a picture into the AAD window. Since AAX is launched in the browser, I now need an efficient way to get the art to the correct folder. The easiest way to do that would be to be able to drag the art to AAD and save from there.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2297
OK, got it working! You rock Alex!


I know he's my favorite developer right now!

Now I have another feature request ;-)

The ability to drag and drop a picture into the AAD window. Since AAX is launched in the browser, I now need an efficient way to get the art to the correct folder. The easiest way to do that would be to be able to drag the art to AAD and save from there.


Actually... Do the boo scripts have a variable that contains the local path to the tracks?

IOW, looking at the Album Art Exchange boo you just made it looks like ${artist} contains artist and ${album} contains the album (duh?  ) Is there a similar ${path} or ${folder} or some other variable?

If so, I assume adding something like "System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(${path})" near the other call with the URL would also open the location of the local files. (Heck if you are opening one window why not two!)

Matt

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2298
The ability to drag and drop a picture into the AAD window.

Do the boo scripts have a variable that contains the local path to the tracks?

Thanks for the nice comments, both of you! I'm afraid the path to the tracks is not passed to the scripts, only search terms and the IScriptResults object for adding the results to.

What a script can do, though, is open a window as a drop target that you can drag and drop image files onto. It can then return each image dropped onto it as a search result from that source. This will only work if your browser actually drags and drops image files, of course. I've tried it with Firefox here, and it works. IE9 doesn't, it only drags the URL of the image (and in Protected Mode will refuse to drag and drop anything at all). I don't know about Chrome.

Anyway, here's the script if you want to give it a go: file-drop-target.boo

Needless to say, this one is a bit specialist and isn't going to go in the standard collection either. Might try and put together a wiki page for it sometime, though.

Allowing you to drop onto the main AAD window itself would of course require an update to the program itself, not just a script. This has some subtleties about it, because there are several bits of AAD that work under the assumption that once the sources have all finished returning results, the results list can be regarded as complete. If you were able to add stuff to it whenever you liked by just dropping it, that would confuse things. Not saying it's impossible, of course, just that it would take a quite a lot more thought and design than just porting the code from the script drop target to the main window - and I'm not sure that it's that useful a feature.

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #2299
Alex, maybe a few of these things can be done at the same time and make some parts easier.

I would envision an optional/drop down window at the top (under options/above search results) that is basically the target folder. You could display current artwork, drag and drop images to this area, and possibly display artist/track info in that window as well.

This would be a work around so you wouldn't be dragging new images into the search results, and also a good place to display current artwork.