2009-10-26, 23:34
Probably like a lot of other people here, soon after I started using Library Mode in XBMC, I became kind of obsessed with making it as nice looking as possible. For media, this means getting the art and metadata all into shape. For movies and TV shows this has become a relatively painless task since there's half a dozen different dedicated programs that will download and generate the XBMC-specific files for your TV shows and movies. (I use Ember Media Manager and love it)
But what about music? For a variety of reasons, music is still a lot trickier than it used to be. I'm going to attempt to collate all the stuff I have learned to a single thread to make it easier for other people who may be just getting started with this stuff. I've been collecting music for about 10 years and have amassed about 200GB of it in digital formats.
Sooo, first of all, the laziest methods possible:
1-Let XBMC Do It For You!
If you're not a big perfectionist and you want to get stuff working quickly & easily, at this point there are services set up to allow XBMC to get the art for you. You need at a bare minimum, music files with tags correctly identifying the artist and album names. This info, plus even mostly-correct song titles will allow XBMC to probably download and use an artist thumbnail, an artist fanart background picture, and album cover art as well.
XBMC can and will download art from htbackdrops.com (which has per-artist thumbnails and fanart backdrops), discogs.com (some artist thumbnail-type stuff and most album cover art), and last.fm (usually at least one decent artist thumbnail and most album cover art). You basically just need to go into Music, highlight the folder where your music files are, bring up the context menu and choose "Scan Item To Library". You may need to check your Settings (Settings > Music > Library) to ensure XBMC downloads everything you want it to.
The main drawback from this is, aside from HTBackdrops, you never know what kind of images you'll get. In the case of artist thumbs, this often means rectangular thumbs of all shapes and sizes, and in the case of both artist thumbs and cover art, a wide variety of resolutions. If you take a 130x130 pixel square cover art picture and blow it up to fill half of a 1080P screen, it's going to look terrible.
This leads us to
2-Do It Yourself
I highly recommend you scan in maybe a dozen or so artists and then fiddle around with XBMC so you can learn what works and doesn't work for you. You may find you can't live without having fanart on every single artist, or you may decide to completely ignore it. There's no accounting for taste, after all Aside from deciding how to handle Fanart, you should also probably decide what your minimum and maximum art file sizes should be for both artist thumbnails and album art thumbnails. Part of what makes this process so annoying is there really is not universal standard size. I personally settled on 500x500 square images for both.
1-Its big enough to look decent in most views and at most resolutions
2-Its not so huge that it bloats your music files too much
3-Its fairly middle of the road so you can generally find images big enough for use in this standard.
4-Its a nice round number
Artist Thumbnails
Since its currently the only site dedicated to this topic, you're going to want to check htbackdrops.com first. I've personally uploaded over 300 backdrops and thumbnails to this site, and there are over 800 thumbnails there at the moment, so most of the popular bands are covered already, just download and you're good to go
Once you either have downloaded or made an artist thumbnail, you will want to place it in your library. The most common method of organizing music is to have one folder for each artist in your collection. If you do this, just place the artist thumbnail inside that artist's folder and named it "folder.jpg" (without quotes) and XBMC will automatically detecte and use it when that artist is scanned to your library.
Making New Images From Scratch
If you can't find an artist thumbnail, fanart, or cover art that meets your standards, you'll have to make one yourself. "Oh crap, I don't have / can't afford / don't want to learn Photoshop! What am I supposed to do?" I used Photoshop for a few years and it is honestly really, really nice, but for this kind of thing you won't use 90% of the features. So, instead I use Pixlr.
Pixlr is a free, Flash-based app that runs exclusively in your web browser and gives you like 90% of the functionality of Photoshop instantly. One of my favorite features is its ability to open an image from a URL. This makes it ideal (IMO) for editing / mangling images you found online. Mostly what you're going to be doing is finding an image that is either already perfect for your needs, or almost there. I am uncreative so to locate images I use Google Image Search. In case you didn't know, you can actually specify the general size of images that will show up in the results. This allows you to filter out everything but the big huge images when you're trying to make Fanart.
For fanart and artist thumbs, often its as dumb as doing a Large Image Search for the artist's name. Random Example: Moby
If you click that you will see that Google does show you the pixel dimensions of each image. If you're going for Fanart, it basically must be at least 1280 x 720 (the standard dimensions for a 720P resolution screen). Aside from size the other general rules for choosing an image are:
-Do not use an album cover as Fanart or an artist thumb. This will result in a dumb looking library because the same image will likely recur at least twice, plus it will cause your library to lack variety. You CAN do this, but I only do this if I simply can't find any other good images at all
-For artist thumbnails get something that will fit into a square image. This can be hard for bands with 3+ people, because the standard photos are usually like 4 guys standing side by side, which results in a rectangular image.
-Along the same lines, if you're going for fanart, you will need something that either is already a wide rectangle, or can be cropped as needed.
But what about music? For a variety of reasons, music is still a lot trickier than it used to be. I'm going to attempt to collate all the stuff I have learned to a single thread to make it easier for other people who may be just getting started with this stuff. I've been collecting music for about 10 years and have amassed about 200GB of it in digital formats.
Sooo, first of all, the laziest methods possible:
1-Let XBMC Do It For You!
If you're not a big perfectionist and you want to get stuff working quickly & easily, at this point there are services set up to allow XBMC to get the art for you. You need at a bare minimum, music files with tags correctly identifying the artist and album names. This info, plus even mostly-correct song titles will allow XBMC to probably download and use an artist thumbnail, an artist fanart background picture, and album cover art as well.
XBMC can and will download art from htbackdrops.com (which has per-artist thumbnails and fanart backdrops), discogs.com (some artist thumbnail-type stuff and most album cover art), and last.fm (usually at least one decent artist thumbnail and most album cover art). You basically just need to go into Music, highlight the folder where your music files are, bring up the context menu and choose "Scan Item To Library". You may need to check your Settings (Settings > Music > Library) to ensure XBMC downloads everything you want it to.
The main drawback from this is, aside from HTBackdrops, you never know what kind of images you'll get. In the case of artist thumbs, this often means rectangular thumbs of all shapes and sizes, and in the case of both artist thumbs and cover art, a wide variety of resolutions. If you take a 130x130 pixel square cover art picture and blow it up to fill half of a 1080P screen, it's going to look terrible.
This leads us to
2-Do It Yourself
I highly recommend you scan in maybe a dozen or so artists and then fiddle around with XBMC so you can learn what works and doesn't work for you. You may find you can't live without having fanart on every single artist, or you may decide to completely ignore it. There's no accounting for taste, after all Aside from deciding how to handle Fanart, you should also probably decide what your minimum and maximum art file sizes should be for both artist thumbnails and album art thumbnails. Part of what makes this process so annoying is there really is not universal standard size. I personally settled on 500x500 square images for both.
1-Its big enough to look decent in most views and at most resolutions
2-Its not so huge that it bloats your music files too much
3-Its fairly middle of the road so you can generally find images big enough for use in this standard.
4-Its a nice round number
Artist Thumbnails
Since its currently the only site dedicated to this topic, you're going to want to check htbackdrops.com first. I've personally uploaded over 300 backdrops and thumbnails to this site, and there are over 800 thumbnails there at the moment, so most of the popular bands are covered already, just download and you're good to go
Once you either have downloaded or made an artist thumbnail, you will want to place it in your library. The most common method of organizing music is to have one folder for each artist in your collection. If you do this, just place the artist thumbnail inside that artist's folder and named it "folder.jpg" (without quotes) and XBMC will automatically detecte and use it when that artist is scanned to your library.
Making New Images From Scratch
If you can't find an artist thumbnail, fanart, or cover art that meets your standards, you'll have to make one yourself. "Oh crap, I don't have / can't afford / don't want to learn Photoshop! What am I supposed to do?" I used Photoshop for a few years and it is honestly really, really nice, but for this kind of thing you won't use 90% of the features. So, instead I use Pixlr.
Pixlr is a free, Flash-based app that runs exclusively in your web browser and gives you like 90% of the functionality of Photoshop instantly. One of my favorite features is its ability to open an image from a URL. This makes it ideal (IMO) for editing / mangling images you found online. Mostly what you're going to be doing is finding an image that is either already perfect for your needs, or almost there. I am uncreative so to locate images I use Google Image Search. In case you didn't know, you can actually specify the general size of images that will show up in the results. This allows you to filter out everything but the big huge images when you're trying to make Fanart.
For fanart and artist thumbs, often its as dumb as doing a Large Image Search for the artist's name. Random Example: Moby
If you click that you will see that Google does show you the pixel dimensions of each image. If you're going for Fanart, it basically must be at least 1280 x 720 (the standard dimensions for a 720P resolution screen). Aside from size the other general rules for choosing an image are:
-Do not use an album cover as Fanart or an artist thumb. This will result in a dumb looking library because the same image will likely recur at least twice, plus it will cause your library to lack variety. You CAN do this, but I only do this if I simply can't find any other good images at all
-For artist thumbnails get something that will fit into a square image. This can be hard for bands with 3+ people, because the standard photos are usually like 4 guys standing side by side, which results in a rectangular image.
-Along the same lines, if you're going for fanart, you will need something that either is already a wide rectangle, or can be cropped as needed.