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Topic: Album Art Downloader XUI (Read 2023069 times) previous topic - next topic
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Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #125
1. OK, odd as it may be in the circumstances you are describing, this is in fact the correct behaviour of the Queue system. It is there to prevent more than a specified number of simultaneous searches, so after that limit is reached, further searches are held in the queue. They can either be manually triggered by double clicking on them (as you have found), or will automatically run once an existing search is closed.

So, what's happening here is that your fourth search goes on the queue. If you close the Queue Manager window, that doesn't affect the queue at all, just stops showing it to you. (You can see it again by selecting "Queue Manager" from the "Window" menu.) Subsequent searches are also queued up, even though you can't see them if the manager window is closed. As you close existing windows, searches from the queue are popped off the queue and executed.

The important thing is that the Queue Manager window is just the thing that lets see and manipulate the queue, it is not the queue itself.

To avoid queueing behaviour altogether, just set the Simultaneous Windows number in the Queue Manager to a high number (10000 or something).

2. There is no specific PID changing behaviour or anything (I'm not even sure such a thing is possible!). The single-instance behaviour is that if AAD is already running, then any new instance of it started will send its command line parameters to the existing instance (through the named pipe net.pipe://localhost/AlbumArtDownloader/SingleInstance, if that's of any interest), then immediately exit. I can't see any way the PID of the original process would change as a result of this.

There is currently no option to avoid the single instance behaviour and run multiple instances of AAD, sorry. Without this, I can't think of any good way to wait for a specific search to be complete either, as no process will end, only a window will probably close (unless re-used for another search), and it is not programatically obvious which window, either.

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #126
Hi! I just discovered this program, I have installed it (and NET 3.0) because it looks very promising! But on my computer (Windows XP) it does not start. The error message is "This program must be closed, do you want to send the error report to Microsoft?"

According to that window, the error report contains the following information - maybe this is useful to the program developers:

Quote
EventType : clr20r3    P1 : albumart.exe    P2 : 0.10.1.0    P3 : 47090190
P4 : mscorlib    P5 : 2.0.0.0    P6 : 471ebc5b    P7 : 1c4c    P8 : 0   
P9 : system.typeloadexception


The error occurs when I start the program, before anything else happens. I cannot see any program windows. I have tried both installing the program as an administrator and installing it as a normal user, the error message is the same both times.

If there is something else I can do to help identify this error, let me know. With best wishes for 2008!

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #127
Hi! I just discovered this program, I have installed it (and NET 3.0) because it looks very promising! But on my computer (Windows XP) it does not start...

Hi, thanks for reporting the error. Unfortunately the information that the error report window contained doesn't say much to me. There is a custom error reporting feature in AAD that should write out any errors to errorlog.txt (in the AAD program folder) then display that file in notepad, should a crash occur, but it looks like the program is failing to even load at all, so this isn't happening.

The only thing I can suggest is installing the latest version of the .net framework (3.5) and hoping for the best.

Alex


Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #129
1. OK, odd as it may be in the circumstances you are describing, this is in fact the correct behaviour of the Queue system....

That makes perfect sense now that I know I can reopen the queue manager window.
2. There is no specific PID changing behaviour or anything (I'm not even sure such a thing is possible!)...

There is currently no option to avoid the single instance behaviour and run multiple instances of AAD, sorry. Without this, I can't think of any good way to wait for a specific search to be complete either, as no process will end, only a window will probably close (unless re-used for another search), and it is not programatically obvious which window, either.

I like the single instance a lot!  It minimizes AAD's system resource usage. I did a lot of testing, and at least on Vista, the PID for the AAD process started by my script changes when the original process takes it over. The change for the script spawned process makes sense, because that process dies once the single instance takes over.  I am about 50% confident the PID for the original process changed, too. This change seems odd, so I may have been sleepy while I was testing.

The easiest way I can think of to identify a script invoked window would be to add a command line argument to AAD along the lines of:

/WinTitle "Whatever you like here"

The script is a back end for EAC, so I'd probably use "Album Art Downloader - EACcompressor - %artist% - %album%" for the window title.  Then my script could find the correct window easily.

EDIT: For now, I'm using a temporary file in the destination directory to control AAD's behavior in my script. So the /WinTitle option would be nice, but not urgent.

Thanks,
dd_wizard

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #130
Hi! I just discovered this program, I have installed it (and NET 3.0) because it looks very promising! But on my computer (Windows XP) it does not start...

Hi, thanks for reporting the error. Unfortunately the information that the error report window contained doesn't say much to me.The only thing I can suggest is installing the latest version of the .net framework (3.5) and hoping for the best.

Follow-up: The Microsoft installer for 3.5 failed with an unspecified error message, so the blame must have been with the .NET setup in my computer. I tried to "repair" it with the .NET 3.0 installer, which failed also. The only option I had was to erase the whole .NET stuff with this tool: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/200...04/6659905.aspx . Then I reinstalled .NET version 3.5.
Now the Album Art Downloader works! Looking forward to trying it out.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #131
... I reinstalled .NET version 3.5.
Now the Album Art Downloader works! Looking forward to trying it out.
Great! Thanks for letting me know.

dd_wizard: I'll consider a /WinTitle parameter but it feels a bit ugly. I might try thinking up something more elegant, perhaps a /wait parameter instead...

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #132
Hola,

I've been using the new album art downloader for a few weeks now (another reason to love foobar: great tools on its forum! ) . Let me say that this is the first such program I've been settled, and which worked as it promised... also, you're a quite responsive developer, which is sadly rare, especially in foobar territory... I've encountered several problems along the way, so here's the blacklist (using version 0.10.1.0):


- There's a huge memory leak bug - sometimes (quite randomly, in fact) after dropping files in the File browser, AlbumArt instantly starts to consume several hundred megs of ram (eventually, all) *instantly*. I wish I could give a log file, but when I include the config file to create that, the program doesn't start. log for that attached.
- File browser sometimes doesn't recognize dropped folders/files, even if it has tags.
- Tag guessing could be better, and should be mixed with tag info. An album, which has several artist included (eg. mix cd, features etc) shouldn't show up as a different album when searching for art. A simple check whether the files originate from the same folder should help.
- I think the GUI is a bit confusing at first...couldn't you somehow integrate it more into one window? It's a bit awkward to have at least 3-4 windows open while searching for an art... especially since the default open search window count is set to 3... At least file browser/album search should be integrated into one (along with a file browser, perhaps), so user could make a quick browsing/downloading session without the need to drag&drop, which slows down this process considerably.
- In search window, user should be able to turn the sorting off (or include an option to show new results on the bottom). It happened to me several times that the first few matches were allright, wanted to click on the save button, but in that milisecond a new result appeared, and so I've clicked on the wrong pic...
- On the File Browser, there should be a button to clear the contents of the window. It's a bit of a pain to always open new window/close the previous each time the previous one gets too crowded.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #133

Hello, thank you for your kind comments. Let me reply to your points in order:

Memory Leak Oh dear, that's bad news. I've spent a lot of time trying to track down leaks, and thought I'd got all of them. Unfortunately, to track a leak, I need a loop that returns to the same point, but with less memory. Consuming lots of memory after lots of files have been added to the file browser, while undesirable, doesn't necessarily mean it is leaked, it might just be being used to process those files. It would only be leaked if the memory was not recovered once the files were removed from the list, or the file browser closed. I'll have a look around to see if there is any glaring memory inefficiency in the way that files are added to the browser, though.

If it only happens for certain files, or files added in a certain way, then that would indicate a bug and be a starting point to investigate.

Log file The error log you sent me indicates that the config file was not well formed XML. If you send me the AlbumArt.exe.Config file I can let you know why.

Unrecognized tags Is there a specific file you have that has tags which aren't recognized? If so, please try looking at it with MediaInfo, which is what AAD uses internally to read the tags. If that can read Artist and Album tags, but AAD can't, then I will investigate further. In that case it might be helpful if you could send me the file in question.

"Tag guessing could be better, and should be mixed with tag info Sorry, I'm not sure I really understand what you are getting at here. The tags that are read are Artist and Album (as reported by MediaInfo), there is no guessing or other info used.

"A simple check whether the files originate from the same folder should help" That's assuming that each folder contains one album, and there should be only one album image per folder. This is not an assumption I want to limit AAD to making. Various Artists albums are always going to be a bit tricky, as there isn't an easy way to distinguish between that, and a folder full of random singles.

There might be something to be done in this area with Album Artist and Track Artist, but I'm not sure how often a distinction between those fields is actually made.

Multi-window GUI The design to have one window per search is pretty much set in stone now. It would need a pretty fundamental change in architecture to change that, and I don't intend to. Given that constraint, having a separate window for file browser seems the only natural place to put one, given that it could result in several searches.

I'm not sure what you mean about the need to drag and drop - the only time you might use drag and drop would be to drop files on to the browser, and surely that would be the same regardless of whether it was in the same window as the search results or not? Perhaps I'm missing something.

Turning off sorting That makes sense, yes. There would be a performance improvement for not having to sort, too. I'll put it in the next version.

Clearing I'll hook up the Del key to remove selected albums from the list for the next version. Alternatively, if you use the Search button, it will clear the current contents and replace them with what it finds searching the path specified. A quick Search, Esc combination would therefore result in a cleared list :-)

Thanks again for your comments and suggestions,

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #134
Hey, thanks for this program.  It works great.  I have a couple suggestions for the next relase.

1.  In the file browser I would love to have the dimensions of the album art.  This way I can sort by dimensions and be able to replace small album art.  If that isn't possible file size might do.
2.When searching an album that already has album art it would be nice to have a picture of the album art you already have with the size underneath it.  Maybe in the source column, above or below the sources.
3.As previously suggested, it would be great to be in one window with tabs.
4.As previously suggested, various artist albums are a pain.  Maybe there could be an option to select 'one album per folder' so it won't search for art for every song of the various artist album.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #135


Memory leak For the config file, I've suspected that there's an xml error, but I couldn't do much, since, I've copied the exact code from your post: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=521325
(For future releases, couldn't you just implement a simple config switch in the file application data/albumart/config?) Anyway, here's the file: http://poisonborz.extra.hu/aaconfig

Unrecognized tags I've been experimenting with tags, here's all I can suspect: since mediainfo reads the tags properly, at first I've suspected that AAD encountered unexpected values. But as it turned out, a simple overwriting/re-saving of (these kind of) tags is enough. Don't know if it's a good idea, but here's a link of an unedited file that did not get recognized (It's a Taj Mahal track):
http://poisonborz.extra.hu/temp.mp3
If I download, open it in a tag editor, and save it again, it gets recognized. I hope this helps somehow.

Multi-window GUI  emfletcher's idea about tabs is also great - if multiple windows are necessary, at least they could be enclosed in a multiple tabbed window...

Various Artist albums Maybe the user could set the pattern of the folder structure of his collection... Don't know if I'm right, but there's already something like this in the [albumart_recognizer_path] section of the config file. Maybe a text field in the options of the File Browser, with a simple "scripting language" assisted with buttons.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #136

1: That would slow things down considerably, as it would have to open and read each art file. File size could work, though, it should be fast enough to query the filesystem for that.

2: Existing album art is returned by the Local Files source (as long as you have it checked), and appears in the main search area. There seems to be a bug with the path it searches under when launched from the file browser, though, so I'll try to fix that for the next version.

3: Not going to happen. Writing a container window to hold all the other windows inside it would be a pain to do, and would mean that you couldn't see them side by side, and they'd all have to be the same size. I just don't see the advantage of it.

4: The File Browser is exclusively tag based, not file system based. It would be possible to write another browser which got artist and album information from a path pattern that you could specify, and that's a useful idea for the future. There's no reason that you should be forced to use tags when filenames can contain the same info, so long as a pattern for it can be specified. I'll keep it as a nice-to-have idea, but it won't be coming any time soon.


Config File There was a blank line at the start of that config file, where there shouldn't have been. I've fixed the post you linked so that it doesn't start with a blank line, sorry about that. The very first character in the file should be a <. The reason it is a config file rather than a switch, is that this is functionality built in to the .net CLR, not something specific to AAD. A config file like that works for any .net app.

Unrecognized tags Updating to the latest version of MediaInfo allows me to read that test file, so the next version of AAD (which will use the latest available MediaInfo) should read it too. If you don't want to wait, grab the latest MediaInfo DLL, and extract MediaInfo.dll into the AAD program folder, overwriting the existing one.

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #137
This little tool is simply amazing! Thanks for this! But I got one question anyhow. When an album is exactly called like the band It doesn't find any cover. The only field filled is the artist one. Is there a solution for this problem?

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #138
This little tool is simply amazing! Thanks for this! But I got one question anyhow. When an album is exactly called like the band It doesn't find any cover. The only field filled is the artist one. Is there a solution for this problem?

Put the band name in both fields.  You'll get a lot of false positives, probably, but you should find your album cover.  Leaving the album name blank is not the way to go.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #139
Yeah I know but what I don't understand is why it's not filled in automatically. It's workin when the album title is different from the band name but otherwise it's not workin when both names are equal.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #140
Can anyone write a script for buy.com?  They have a lot of 500x500 images that are often better quality than amazon's.  If i knew anything about scripting i would try myself.

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #141
Just some additional ideas:

the file browser not refreshing itself (artwork status field) if the Search window option 'close after
saving' is turned on (if that was not working like that before, it should  - in every file browser
window instance, if that is possible)

please re-do somehow the row selection mechanism in the file browser. It's very annoying that eg.
you select 6 row, and a sloppy click somewhere besides the checkbox clears all those selections.
User should be able to click anywhere in a row to check/uncheck that row. There's many occassions when I don't use 'select all albums with missing artwork', and individually selecting multiple rows with only a tiny checkbox is stressful.

Also, rows where album art is found should be highlighted somehow (a slightly different background color perhaps), since in a crowded file browser window it's a bit harder to pay attention to a simple icon/field value.

In the 'specify path to find images' field in file browser, are multiple expressions allowed? I don't quite get the mechanism: does AAD uses the same value to look for an album art, and to name a file on save? (the label on the field is confusing) Since filling in 'Folder.jpg' won't detect 'folder.jpg', nor any other file types...

Also, when can we expect the next version?

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #142
FIRST UP GREAT PROGRAM !!! 

Now for my question.... the layout is really intuitive to use.... but

I have no idea HOW i can make it just search ONCE for each album which has no album art, not for each song of the album... ???

I know i can go through and a individually select one song from each album... BUT is there a EASIER way?




I have a little free time now and would love to smash through the art in the next couple of hours.


Cheers for your help guys. 

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #143
When an album is exactly called like the band It doesn't find any cover. The only field filled is the artist one. Is there a solution for this problem?

I haven't been able to reproduce this. Could you be more specific about what you are doing? Are you starting from the file browser, or the foobar browser, or the command line?


I'll look into the file browser refreshing issue, that sounds like a bug.

If you want to click anywhere in a row to select, hold down Ctrl to select individual rows, or Shift to select all rows in a range. This is standard selection behaviour. The problem with making click automatically extend the selection is that there is no obvious way of getting the alternative behaviour of clicking to select just what is clicked on. Keeping the normal click to select behaviour means that the alternative click to extend behaviour can still be accessed either through standard keyboard modifiers, or through the checkboxes.

I like the row colour idea, and will see if some subtle shading would look good. Alternatively, you could always sort by the art status.

For the 'specify path to find images' field in file browser, what do you mean by multiple expressions?
Filling in "Folder.jpg" should certainly detect "folder.jpg" as the search is case-insensitive. For other filetypes, try "folder.*" instead. The path (if not absolute) is relative to the audio file the tags were read from, so "folder.jpg" means "folder.jpg in the same folder as the audio file". The placeholder "/**/" can be used to search arbitrary sub-folders, so "./**/folder.jpg" means "folder.jpg in the same folder as the audio file, or any sub-folder of that folder".

When launching a search for an album from the file browser, the default path to save to is automatically filled in as the path to find images for that file browser, on the grounds that if that's where you were expecting to find images, that's where you would like them to go. There's currently a bug that this will include wildcards, but I'll have that fixed for the next version.

You can expect the next version soon. It was going to be today, as I've finished everything that I had planned, but given the above additional changes to make too, it might not be.


Thanks, I'm glad you like it! I'm afraid if each song on your album has a different artist or album title tag, then there is no way to get it to just choose one of those to display in the file browser and ignore the others. If they all have the same artist and album, then only one entry should appear.

There has been a proposal for a filename based browser rather than tag based, which would mean you could define your album and artist by the path to folder rather than the tags in the files, but that won't be in the next release.

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #144
Cheers Alex....

Now that i understand why
.... is there a way where you could search and aggregate all the files which have the same (ALBUM) title and then only display one instance of the duplicate (in the search window).

Not that i know anything about writing code for program.... surely this would be a (relatively) simple task....

I may have even overcomplicated the process...?

Just an idea and i would love to see other peoples opinions on a solution.

Thanks again.   

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #145

You are right, this would be a relatively simple task. The question, though, is whether it is the right thing to do.

Album name alone is not enough to uniquely identify an album. For a trivial example, how many albums called "Greatest Hits" do you think there are? If you found it impossible to add both your "Greatest Hits" (Spice Girls) and "Greatest Hits" (The Cure) to the file browser without removing one first, with no indication of why the second one wasn't appearing, you'd probably be pretty upset.

Various Artists albums are always going to be a problem, as I mentioned in a previous post. The only solutions I can think of are insisting on a separate Album Artist tag, or doing a filename/folder-based approach. To be honest, this problem is aggravated by my not owning any Various Artists albums, and my being the only developer on this project at present.

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #146
Quote
For other filetypes, try "folder.*"


Besides the already mentioned wildcard bug, how would this work if I set it to folder.jpg, and the file I want to save from search window is a png? Without conversion, it would get an incorrect extension... (it would be a nice feature in a future version, if user would have the ability to set saving extension, with automatic conversion afterwards)

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #147
Quote
For other filetypes, try "folder.*"
Besides the already mentioned wildcard bug, how would this work if I set it to folder.jpg, and the file I want to save from search window is a png? Without conversion, it would get an incorrect extension...

Worry not! This case is already handled by the wildcard bug fix, and would appear in the search window as "folder.%extension%", causing the extension used to save the file to be determined by the type of the file being saved.

Alex

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #148
AlbumArt Downloader XUI v0.11 Released

As promised, here is the new version of Album Art Downloader XUI. This version includes various suggested improvements that were requested on this thread:
  • Added /separateInstance parameter, for optional prevention of the single instance behaviour. Use of this parameter is not generally recommended.
  • Added ability to remove items from the File/Foobar browser using the Delete key
  • Added art file size column to File/Foobar browser
  • Added background colouring to the File/Foobar browser rows to help indicate artwork status (missing gives a red highlight, present gives green)
  • Added the ability to view the results unsorted (in the order in which they are found)
  • Fixed bug where local files search would not be searching the right location when the search window was launched from the file or foobar browser.
  • Fixed bug where the default save path would be populated with wildcards from the file or foobar browser.
  • Fixed scripts: Coveralia, CoverIsland
Download:
AlbumArtDownloaderXUI.exe (Installer. Recommended)
AlbumArtDownloaderXUI.zip (zip archive for those who don't like installers)
.NET Framework 3.0 (required)

Album Art Downloader XUI

Reply #149
The changes are great!
However, I couldn't stop to add some additional notes

In the search window, it would be a nice addition if there would be some sort of progress meter, or at least a download notification area. Sometimes images take way too long to download (I mainly use google images) and  esp. for an average user, watching  a little clock icon for 1 min is not the best indication of stability.

In the queue window, there should be a queue count, displaying the number of items in queue.