Album Cover Plugin

2003-08-05 03:22:36

Hiya, have a little idea for a foobar plugin. Nothing useful but would be nice.

Say you were playing a full album from a directory e.g the beatles - help!, and within the directory you also have the jpgs of the album cover for it.

It would be nice if there was a plug-in that could scan the directory from which the files are being played, looking for jpegs then displaying the jpegs in a small window next to the foobar window.

Now i have looked about and there is already a plugin written for xmms on sourceforge which does exactly that

Coverviewer

now i'm not sure if the code can be adapted for foobar or whatever (i don't even know if it is legal to do so either as i'm not up on my open source licencing)

Anything is better than putting the covers in the tags of audio files like i used to do to get EAR for winamp working. The idea is like what album list for winamp does with the mini browser.

Saint

Album Cover Plugin

Reply #1 – 2003-08-05 04:30:39

Speaking of this topic. Does anyone know why only some album art is downloaded and not others? For example, I have a folder for a certain genre a music that gets multiple album covers downloaded, but then I have a folder just for a specific album and no art is downloaded for that.

What exactly causes the downloading of album art, and is there anyway to force it?

Album Cover Plugin

Reply #2 – 2003-08-05 05:32:23

MP3 files with 1MB BMP files shoved into the ID3v2 tag?

Album Cover Plugin

Reply #3 – 2003-08-05 09:36:00

I actually wanted to suggest something like that as well. Looks like you beat me to it, Saint.

kode54: I don't know if anybody else wants it, but I don't want/need the cover art embedded in the audio file itself. I do like to store a separate JPG file of the cover art in the directory of the album (with the name cover.jpg or <name of album>.jpg). It would be cool if a FB2K plugin would "automagically" discover this file in the directory of the currently playing audio file and display it.

Album Cover Plugin

Reply #4 – 2003-08-05 11:13:39

Yeah, Like windows media player9, if u remane the art works to folder.jpg, windows media player9 auto display them

and media jukebox does the samething

we dont really need to put artworks in id3 tag

Album Cover Plugin

Reply #5 – 2003-08-05 11:27:25

I think Kode54 was replying to the "is there anyway to force it?" comment in the previous post. But i did mention in the original post about not sticking images in the tags, thats evil! 

Saint

Album Cover Plugin

Reply #6 – 2003-09-27 00:09:43

I would just LOVE this.  Is there any way somebody could do it?  I'd be SOOOO happy 

Album Cover Plugin

Reply #7 – 2003-12-18 08:41:26

hi,

well, in the meantime foo_looks became able to display cover art... i still think a dedicated cover plugin would be much better, because "looks" are not resizeable and it is too much of a hassle to install foo_looks with gdi etc just to see some albumart.

anyone to make a simple component that just plainly displays cover jpgs and anything else? 

regards; ilikedirt

Album Cover Plugin

Reply #8 – 2003-12-18 10:08:36

Actually there's already a plugin that displays covers in foobar: that's foo_tunes. It seeks the album directory for jpg or gif files and displays them in a separate window (in addition to other windows like a file explorer and a file info window).

Each window is resizeable, so if you wish you can display the covert art only , not the file explorer or the file info.

The downside to it is that the cover part of the plugin isn't tweakable at all so far. For now, you can't choose the background color, or display the cover full screen. I've asked the developper of this plugin for these features, no idea if my request will be listened to. Plus, this component goes with a "column" playlist display, which means you'll have to give up to your favourite Tagz formatting if you choose to use it.

So I think a dedicated component would be the best solution. Long ago I started including covers inside ID3v2 tags but it became very awkward when I started encoding in MPC and tagging in APE. Not until very recently have I stopped shoving covers into ID3v2 tags (most of them I deleted while retagging my files in APE and replaygaining them) and started puttting the jpg cover in each album directory instead. One important thing IMO is that this component scans any jpg that's in the same directory, i.e. not on the basis of its name formatting. I guess everyone has its own preferences as to cover names (I for one name them "%artist% - %album% (%year%)"), and it would be really a pain in the *ss to rename hundreds of covers just to be get this component working.

Thx to any developper who might take the idea over  (hmm, don't get me wrong, i'm not saying this is my idea )

Album Cover Plugin

Reply #9 – 2003-12-21 06:05:14

I think a seperate component would be best as well... foo_looks is nice but I find the covers to be too small or too big...  Having a seperate component that could manually set a size would be perfect!

Album Cover Plugin

Reply #10 – 2003-12-21 10:38:44

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....howtopic=13665&

Here's something I'd like to see that is similar. It's on just about every windows machine, too. Just need a plugin that sends the info there.

EDIT:

It occured to me that you can see this in action with mozilla thunderbird. The mail notification uses the same thing.