How to display Album art in RR, and where do I get the Images?

JohnWPB · 10-26-2007, 07:30 PM

The very first step is to open Road Runner Config, and click on the "MUSIC" tab at the top. Then in the "Album Cover File" make sire it is set to *.jpg

For the images to show up in Road Runner, you will need to have a skin that supports it, as well as album art in EVERY folder of your music collection. If you have artists with multiple albums, you will need an image in the root of that folder as well. For instance:

If your library is organized in the following manner:

- Artist
--[IMAGE]
-----Album Folder # 1
---------[IMAGE]
---------Songs
-----Album Folder # 2
---------[IMAGE]
---------Songs
-----Album Folder # 3
---------[IMAGE]
---------Songs

You would have an album cover art file in each album forlder, BUT you would need one in the "Artist Root folder" as well, or you will not see the almub art till you enter that artist, and highlight one of the almums in that folder. Personaly, I place an artist image in that root folder, so when browsing, I see the artist as the cover art, then when entering that artists folder, then see the correct cover for each album.

Windows also has a habbit of making the "folder.jpg" a hidden file. That can hinder the art showing up, or you even knowing, or being able to see if it is actually in the folder. (It will also prevent you from saving a newer version, as the file is hidden, and windows will not let most programs overwrite the file).

To fix this problem easily, open up a text editor, and place this line into it:

attrib -s -h -r f:\mp3\*.jpg /s

(change the path above in red, to your MP3 Root folder)

Then, save it as UnhideFiles.bat or what ever you want to call it.

Now double click that file, and it will remove the hidden attribute from any of the JPG's in that directory, and all subdirectories as well. For me it takes around 30 seconds for it to to go through my mp3 folder that has a little over 900 Albums in it.

Now, you might think that finding the cover art is a matter of googling and saving the images, which is a VERY daunting task, even for a small music collection. LUCKILY there is a FREE program called Album Cover Art Downloader that pretty much automates the process. It will scan your collection, locate what it thinks is the correct images, (you choose from a thumbnail list) and simply click "Set as cover" It will save the cover in a .png format, as well as a .jpg to the music folder. It goes a step further, and saves the image into the MP3 files themselves, using ID3 V2 tagging. With the MP3Art plugin, Road Runner can display the album art that is embedded right in the MP3 files. This is great for "home grown compilation albums", as you can have a different cover in each MP3 to display.

greatwhite · 10-26-2007, 07:39 PM

"album cover art downloader" linky no worky

slvrsol · 10-27-2007, 06:33 PM

http://www.google.com/search?q=album...art+downloader

JohnWPB · 11-05-2007, 04:44 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by greatwhite

"album cover art downloader" linky no worky

Just checked the link, must have been a internet hickup or something, as it is working now.

Spawn12336 · 11-27-2007, 02:31 PM

There is a much easier way, as far as I am concerned. I did this to make sure that all (all 3000+!!) of my mp3's had cover art for my ipod.

For whatever album you are looking for, enter it in google images search. Most of the images you will get are 300x300 to 500x500, so are fairly small. I found that those programs just weren't accurate enough.

DaveDog · 02-25-2009, 10:00 PM

dll wont register on Win 7

"The module 'mp3art.dll' was loaded but the call to DllRegisterServer failed with error code 0x80004005."

JohnWPB · 02-26-2009, 03:55 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Spawn12336

There is a much easier way, as far as I am concerned. I did this to make sure that all (all 3000+!!) of my mp3's had cover art for my ipod.

For whatever album you are looking for, enter it in google images search. Most of the images you will get are 300x300 to 500x500, so are fairly small. I found that those programs just weren't accurate enough.

Ok, it's been a while since I posted in here...

You think that copying the album name, pasting it in Google, then doing a search, going to the page, clicking on the "show full size image" right clicking to save, and then browsing to the correct folder, and saving it as Folder.jpg is easier (Repeat 3,000 times)?!?!?!

The above program scrapes the sites for you, just select the image on the right, and click "Set as cover". This saves the Folder.jpg, as well as embeds the album art in the song with just a couple clicks!

Here is a screen cap of it in action. Select the album on the left, then click download covers. You can then choose the size you want. You can see it varies from 200x200 to 800x800 different sized images.

DaveDog · 02-28-2009, 06:16 PM

dll issue solved, need to run command prompt as administrator to register dll

wysocki · 04-20-2009, 06:39 PM

John:
Thanks for the input on the cover art downloader. The program can be found at the author's site at http://unrealvoodoo.org/hiteck/projects/albumart/

I found it to be a bit buggy though on my XP sp3 machine. The artist names were read in with a couple of digits added to the front of them along with some weird unicode characters. But the biggest problem I'm having getting cover art into my mp3's is that most of them DON'T have an album name in the tags. They pretty much just have artist and title. Too bad the app can't take just that and then try to match up an album that included that song. Guess I'll keep looking for a better solution.

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