Simple "How To" to add Album Art for Newbie

[erauch]

I searched the forums, and I searched the help, and all I found were problems mentioning bitmaps, on and off showing of album art, wish to change path of album art, and so on and so on. Is there not a simple step by step tutorial or help that tells you how to get album covers or art and implement it? According to the "Help" file is supposed to be as easy as and I will quote here from the Help File:

Extending MediaMonkey's Functionality
MediaMonkey's functionality can be extended through the use of Extensions which are:
scripts that add a variety of different functions, such as generating reports, looking up Album Art, playing random whole albums, etc.

Then it tells you:
To install a script:

Locate a script via the MediaMonkey web site and then proceed to either:
Double-click the downloaded .MMIP file to install the extension
Save the script (e.g. Newscript.vbs) to MediaMonkey's /scripts/auto folder (as described in the script's documentation)
Save the script (e.g. Newscript.vbs) to MediaMonkey's /scripts folder and then define the script in MediaMonkey's "\Scripts\Scripts.ini" file as described in the script's documentation
Restart MediaMonkey and the new functionality will be accessible.

Well I went to the Scripts Site, and the Visualizations, and the General, and the Skins, and so on and so on and I couldn't find or didn't see anything that even mentioned "Album or Cover Art"! Did I just miss it??? Really frustrating! I assumed it would be something simple like getting the album art from Amazon directly or if FreeDB has Album art (maybe they don't -not really familiar with it) or from another cover site like someone else mentioned in the forums.

Is this really that difficult to implement?? I only use Media Monkey currently to play and library Audio Cd's - Not a big Mp3 fan or storing everything in the world to a hard drive fan. If I wan't a portable source I use and buy a Mp3 player. It was hard enough just to figure out how to "Add a Playing Audio CD to the Library". Using the "Menu" didn't work at all, it wasn't until I read the Help and used the "Insert" that I was even successful. There needs to be some more basic tutorials for newbies. I have my own folder full of jpgs of my album covers that I have from using Music Collector, do I need to point to it somehow or what?? Also are you able to show "Both" Sides of an Album Cover - Front and the Back (With Track Info)?? Not a big issue but is sort of neat especially if you were using a Large Cover Flow or some other GUI to look at the Playing Album or track.

I would really appreciate anybody's input on this, I have played with the app and it seems to have so many features and options that it's almost confusing, at least I got it playing CD's when I put them in my drive and seemingly I can add them to the library and get freedb information - if I could get album covers it would almost be perfect.
Thanks!

Ed

[MMan]

It is relly pretty simple, at least for libraries of digital music. Frankly, I am not that familiar with using Monkey just to play Audio CDs! I think that was what the Virtual CD function was built for. You should check that out in the help index. However, Monkey's real strength is managing large libraries of digital music. I for one, ripped an 800+ CD collection into FLAC files (Lossless) which I keep on a network hard drive, play music on my computer and also have a high-end sound card which connects to my home strereo via RCA cables. I never use or need my CDs anymore! You should think about it.

As to adding album art, it quite easy. You can get it from Amazon or if you have the file, you can add that. I find it easiest to do in the album view mode because you can easily tag a whole album (CD) at once. All you need to do is highlight the tracks that you want to get art for or add a file to. If you want to find the art from Amazon, right click and choose auto tag from web or through the menu, tools, auto tag from web. Monkey will then search Amazon and return it's best match. If that is that right cover, you can just click auto-tag. Remember though, by default it will tag everything it gets from Amazon, not just art. If you only want art, make sure that that is the only think checked before selecting autotag. It will then ask if you want to put the art in the folder where the music is stored as well as the tag. Frankly, I have no idea how you would asnwer that for CDs vesus digital music. If it isn't the right cover, the top has a drop down menu that usually has other album/art options. If none of those are right, you can search for the art under another name in that dialogue box. Just be careful, you may have to uncheck the tracks at the bottom to get Monkey to accept a different search name. If you do find the right art, you would need to re-check the tracks to have the art added.

If all you want to do is add existing art from your computer, highlight the tracks, right click and open properties, click the album art tab and there is the option to add art.

Go digital!

[erauch]

Boy, if you want to reply to posts on this forum don't take a phone call or anything or you'll lose whatever you were typing - Times out pretty quickly - That sucks - Anyway as I was trying to say - Thank you for the information. And at least you did direct me sort of down the right path. First it seems that rather than a simple GUI Interface this product really requires the active use of the Explorer Type Tree Window. Somebody really likes Windows Explorer.

Anyway when I did as you said, I was able to have the application retrieve the album art and data (and I believe the apps getting it from Amazon at least as one source) I then went to actually "Auto Tag" and I get a Dialog Box that wants to evidently know where to put the Album Art. It's Titled "Add Album Art" and you have two options.

The first being to "Save the image to the Tag if possible" but it is Grayed out. So I guess the product only assumes an actual "TAG" associated with a stored Mp3, FLAC or whatever hard disk file. Seems like it could be saved in the database where they are storing the rest of the track and artist information but what do I know. Anyway your second option is to
"Save album to image folder" and you are given a default of "folder.jpg". IF you hit enter here - the program will either error or will more importantly lock up entirely and is even difficult to shut down with Task Manager. I assume this is because it is trying to write this folder.jpg either to outer space or to the CD itself which of course is not writable.

So once again with NO Clear newbie documentation I started trying things. The first being I created a directory on another drive: Example "E:\Covers\" and when I got this "folder.jpg" entry I changed it to this "E:\Covers\" and just used the default "folder.jpg". Hmm works! but checking the directory the image is actually named folder.jpg so each time I add a new album it's going to want to overwrite the old "folder.jpg" stored at "E:\covers\". So the next attempt I then added in addition to the Path of my "Covers" directory an unique name to the jpeg such as "Test1.jpg" and of course if I add more I will have to give them unique names too.
Why can't the application just use the unique default name that Amazon gives the jpg???? Other apps do this.
Why can't this sudo directory "E\covers\" at least be remembered by the app? Is there an option setting somewhere? Every add just brings up "folder.jpg" and you have to type the complete path and unique jpg name again.
Also if you attempt to resave the image and overwrite the original - the program hangs and locks up. Definite Bug.
So each and every time you had better create a new jpg name.

Basically once again I have found that pretty much to get the app to work it really wants you to store the actual audio to your hard disk just like Apple wants you to. Something I don't want to do. I'm playing Christmas albums this month and I won't play them again for at least a year - I really want to fill up my hard drive with 30 or 40 albums that I may or not play for a year or even longer - that's going to require a lot of expense and hard disk space. I do like your FLAC idea as I am sort of a music purist but like I said lot's of disk space required.

I think the application would at least work if
A) I either want to spend the time to individually for each CD I play and want to add to the library or database
and enter the complete path and a unique jpg naming each and everytime - a nightmare.
B) If the program could at least store the path for my Cover directory then I could at least just have to type unique ".jpg" names.
C) If the program did at least B) and then used at least's Amazon's or whatever the sources original ".jpg" name is that it Auto Tags from.

Other than that I think I am going to have to hang it up! But thanks again for your thoughtful explanation - it needs to be added as a FAQ somewhere.

Best Regards,

Ed

[Lowlander]

1) You can click right click on the tracks, select Track Properties, go to the Album Art tab and select the Add button to add album art to the songs (after songs have been ripped to the PC).

2) You can copy/move the album arts to the albums folder (if you ripped each album to it's individual folder). Now make sure that "Scan track directories for Album Art" is selected under Tools > Options > Library and use File > Add/Rescan Tracks to the Library and the album art should show up.

3) You can go to your album arts in Window Explorer and drag & drop them to the Album Art window (or Album Art tab in the Track Properties). The selected Album Arts will be added to the highlighted track.

You can't however display multiple album arts (front & back) in MediaMonkey simultaneously or have MediaMonkey cycle through them. Maybe there is a script that can do this, but I don't know about that.

[erauch]

Thanks Lowlander for the response but I think you missed my point. I don't want to rip anything and I don't want to store anything. All I want is the product to play an Audio CD, allow me to catalog or library it along with it's CD Cover.
You kept mentioning in your response "if you rip it". That's the whole problem with all media players these days, with the exception strangely of Windows Media player is that they all want to rip and store the audio file, whether Mp3, AAC, FLAC, APE, WAV, WMA, or whatever before they can do anything. They can't just simply identify, catalog with album cover, and play an Audio CD. But thanks for the response and if I decide to ever rip my Cd's to a hard drive - Anyone got a large hard disk they would like to donate to me? I will definitely try your suggestions.

Ed

[MMan]

Unfortunately for you, that is the way things are going. Converting to Digital requires some up-front time, but once done, it is done for good if you have a back-up. As I mentioned, take a look at the Virtual CD function in the help section. I believe that was originally set up before storage was soooo cheap and people had both CD and digital collections. My very rudimentary understanding is that if you add the CD as a Virtual CD, the tag info on the CD is stored in Monkey's DB, but it konws that the CD is physical, not digital. I don't know how it handles album art. Maybe someone else knows more on the function.

[Lowlander]

I really thought that I read you were ripping despite your initial statement that didn't want to do so.

What you want to do isn't possible (I believe) as you can't associate album art with a CD. Windows Media Player has automatic track data retrieval which is why it shows album art for CD. I assume it might do this each and every time you insert a CD.

The only solution that currently might be available is a script that is able to retrieve this type of information automatically.

As I haven't used a CD in a while you can test the following. Add an album art to a track on the CD in the Track Properties Album Art tab, and only select the option link to image file. Does that work?

[erauch]

Thanks again for the response. I don't know what I said from the beginning that would have given you the idea that I was ripping. I think my statement was something like " I only play CD's". But I apologize and will have to try and explain myself better. As to whether the product supports this or that, I'm no expert for sure, I'm a brand new newbie. I guess I just assumed that I could do everything and still play a simple CD.

I guess the HELP file that makes the following statement needs to be updated to state that the product no longer supports only cataloging Audio CD's even if you don't rip it's contents to a hard drive:

Adding CDs to the Library
MediaMonkey can catalog CDs (Audio CDs or data CDs containing compressed audio Tracks), even if you don't rip the CD contents to your hard drive. To do so, place your CD in your CD Rom drive. If no information about the CD is available on your system, an attempt will be made to identify it by connecting to Freedb over the internet.

Right-click the CD in the My Computer node and make any changes to any of the Track properties (these will be saved to a file called cdplayer.ini so that the CD will be recognized if it is subsequently inserted). Once you're comfortable with the CD's properties, select Add Files to Library or press <Insert> . The CD will be catalogued in the library. CDs that have been added in this manner will appear in the Locations node of the Library, while the Tracks contained within will be browsable via other nodes such as Album or Artist . Note that the Tracks from the album will appear greyed out if they're inaccessible (i.e. if the CD is not inserted), and black if the CD is inserted.

As far as Virtual CD goes, I will have to look into that farther, I guess I misunderstood it's use. It seemed to me to benefit someone who "was" ripping not entire CD's but only certain track's to thier hard drive but still being able to catalog the entire CD for information and cataloging purposes. To be able to tell which tracks you had ripped to your hard drive and which ones you hadn't.

Maybe someday as you predict everything will be on hard drives, or some kind of solid state media or something. But as far as I know other than being able to buy an Mp3 on the Web which you are paying for an inferior quality reproduced copy at close to full if not more than full retail price, the only thing I can go into any brick store and buy as far as I know of is still CD's and DVD's. Shoot recovering old Vinyl is even popular now and what are they burning them to? Cd's. So if CD's are going away, I guess I better figure up how much hard drive storage my collection of over 3,000 CD's and 1,000 Records is going to require, anybody have a guess? I'm guessing in a lossless format, probably close to a few terabytes?
In any case thanks again and I will study and further experiment - seems like its taking an enormous amount of time however to get what I think a basic function of any media player still should be, or at least until CD's are totally Dead.

But a Big Thanks Again, I enjoy the conversation as it at least makes me study more and look in more and different directions!

Best Regards,

Ed

[MMan]

We are trying to help, sorry if we seem to be preaching. I agree that it is hard to switch to digital when you can't buy at least CD quality music in a digital (pre-ripped) format. (Some is available, just not much) Like you, I don't want to and don't pay for digital MP3s because of the quality issues. I still buy CDs, I just rip them immediately into lossless FLAC files. To insure that I am gettting an accurate archival copy of the CD itself, I use Exact Audio Copy (EAC - a free ripping program) to rip the tracks and then add them to the Monkey library. The reason I use EAC is that it has great error checking on the read of the CD to insure that you are getting an accurate copy of the CD. EAC rips it to Wav and then convets to FLAC. While Monkey's FLAC Codec is fine, it doesn't have near the level of error checking on the read of the CD itself. Which is important, because the red book format developed in the 80s for CDs doesn't have nearly as much error checking as even data CDs have today. If EAC does detect an error, it has error correction algoritms to try and estimate a fix by resampling over the error. Once this is done, I never use the CD again.

Obviously this takes time! Depending on the quality of your drive and the CD the rip with full error checking in EAC can take from 10-40 minutes. Newer, unscratched CDs are on the low end. An old badly scratched CD can take an hour plus as EAC trys to fix the errors in the read caused by the scrathches. Most other rippers, will just read what they can based upon the imbedded red book format error checking and call it a day. Since I am trying to make archival copies I go a little overboard and use EAC. Just some things to think about if you ever decide to go digital. Also remember, FLAC is lossless, it doesn't eliminate data to save space, it just stores it more efficiently than raw WAV files.

To answer your question on potential size of your collection in digital format, my collection has 867 CDs and 12,191 tracks. All the music was stored in FLAC files using the above approach, it takes up 267GB. I also keep a back-up copy on another drvie to prevent a loss of all the time ripping the files should a single hard drive fry on me. So you probably should double your capacity estimate and have it on multiple drives. Your CDs would easily fit on a 1TB drive in FLAC, the Records would dependon the quality chosen to convert them to digital. But you would need a second 1TB drive for back-up. That will add it to your Library.

Lastly, to you immediate problem. Out of couriosity I tried to add a CD to my Library using the method described in help section. It worked, and you can add album art using the auto tag, although in a cumbersome way. You can also add album art that already exists on your computer. Put your CD in the drive and as help said, access it through the My Computer Drive letter node. It should have been populated with FreeDB data if it was found. Once there, right click and choose Add/rescan Tracks to Library. Make sure that the CD drive is the only drive selected and that you have CDA checked as a file type and click OK.

Then access the CD trough the locations node or Album node. (I find this is easiest in the Album view) Highlight the tracks of the album and right click and select Auto tag from web. In options within Auto tag, make sure you have it set to ask where to save image. Then Click auto-tag. When the dialogue box comes up you need to specify the complete location to save the file. C\Album Art\U2 - War.jpg etc. Unfortunately, there is no browse option, so it needs to be typed manually. Click Ok and you are done. The art and the CD with the properties will be there the next time you put it in the drive.

If you want to just add art that you have on your computer, you can just follow the steps above and when you access the CD after the Add/rescan, just right click and choose properties, then the album art tab. There you can choose add and at least here it lets you browse for the art.

The key is that Monkey doesn't save Art in the DB! It saves all the other properties, just not Art. Usually, it gets the art from the Tag. It does save a link to Art in your case. You will just need to maintain the Art in a folder(s) outside of Monkey and use the above method to create the links.

[Lowlander]

The issue your having with CD's is the Album Art, otherwise other data works well. Please try my suggestion:

As I haven't used a CD in a while you can test the following. Add an album art to a track on the CD in the Track Properties Album Art tab, and only select the option link to image file. Does that work?

Check if this works to add Abum Art to CD's, it might, I haven't tested it yet.


As for ripping, it's a convenience thing. Just imagen that you can listen to any song at any time without having to look for the CD or listen to songs from different CDs without constantly changing CDs. If you rip to lossless files the quality is probably no issue (although storage could be).

The VirtualCD could be used as a means to rip certain songs (or all) of a CD, but still have the whole CD cataloged (as you indicated). You could choose between lossless or lossy. Lossy would save space and if you insert the CD itself you would still be able to listen to the good quality. Lossless would always give you good quality no matter if CD is inserted or not.

I also advice you to test the quality loss of lossy formats. Most people don't hear the difference in blind tests, which means that most users perceived quality difference is based on their opinion of lossy formats not their hearing. If you do have the means though and are interested in ripping songs you should go lossless, you can always convert to a lossy format from lossless, but not vice versa (there would be no point in doing so).

[MMan]

I agree with lowlander that you likely will not hear the difference between a lossy file riped at a reasonable bit rate and a lossless file (especially with earbuds). You also won't hear 99% of the error corrections caught by EAC. But, I just take the view that I paid all that money for the CDs and am spending a fair amount of time to rip them anyway, why not do it once and do it right. That way you never have to worry about whether you are losing quality. As lowlander said, if you go lossy with sloppy reads, you can't go back to lossless with error correction. But if you go Lossless with good reads, you have files that are as good of quality as you can ever get from the original CD.

I know first hand that it is a pain in the ass upfront, but once done the flexability is amazing! You end up listening to music you never would have taken the time to find and load if it were on CD only. That is especially true for all those "One Good Track" CDs. You won't load them for that one track, but you sure enjoy the track when you hear it!

The ability to creat playlist, suffle, download to portable MP3 players etc. is fantastic. As I mentioned earlier in this post, if you rip to lossless, you can use Monkey as a player on your computer to drive a high end home audio system at a quality level higher than most home audio CD players. (see my post for a description of my set-up http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... &sk=t&sd=a )

Good luck what ever way you decide to go.

[rovingcowboy]

The issue your having with CD's is the Album Art, otherwise other data works well. Please try my suggestion:

As I haven't used a CD in a while you can test the following. Add an album art to a track on the CD in the Track Properties Album Art tab, and only select the option link to image file. Does that work?

Check if this works to add Abum Art to CD's, it might, I haven't tested it yet.

just tried that lowlander with mm 3.0.3 and it did not save the album art to the track on the cd or even the to the cdrom drive letter.. so that don't work in mm 3.0.3

[MMan]

It only works if you first add the CD to the Library from the My Computer/Cd rom drive Node first using Add/Rescan. Then if you access it from the Location or album node it works. At least it did for me.

[rovingcowboy]

It only works if you first add the CD to the Library from the My Computer/Cd rom drive Node first using Add/Rescan. Then if you access it from the Location or album node it works. At least it did for me.

ah!! okay i did not do that since i had already ripped the cd i just stuck it in the drive and used the drives node to select the song and try adding the art that way.. which you said i believe is the virt cd way. but i don't know off hand i never tried to use virt cd, just alway's ripped the songs from the cd's.

[MMan]

Just so there isn't any confusion, none of this involved using the Virtual CD function. It is just a matter of making sure that you add the CD to the Library using Add/Rescan before you try to edit properties or add album art. You can't just edit them or add art in the My Computer node if you haven't added it to the Library.