[SleepyP]

I've starting getting friendly with Album Art Downloader (the same one recommended by a few others in this thread). I find the interface a bit quirky, but overall its a fantastic tool. I've been using that to grab images quickly, and ImageMagick to batch-resize them down to 500x500 (my standardized sound).

Before I post any sort of guide / tips about this stuff, I was curious if any of you folks have any tips / tricks about Album Art Downloader...

[stokedfish]

I have no idea why people need apps like album art downloader. I've got more than 800 albums, everything with embedded arts, and all I've ever used is google images and easytag...

[marcozd]

I have already pulled thumbnails for the artists that match htbackdrops, but most of them are not present.

For example, I was unable to find "Loretta Lynn" or "Sheryl Crow" or "The Police".

Hence I am trudging along, doing 30-40 artists per day. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

I have a question though. My plan was to download all of the artists pictures and then re-size them to 500 x 500. The are all named according to the artist name i.e. "Beatles, The". I figured that once I was done grabbing and cropping, I could just upload the whole directory to htbackdrops.com. But will that work? What if some of the files are the same as those on htbackdrops.com?

Let me know if this will ultimately work out the way I am describing it.

you could probably use XBMC get the already-existing images from HTBackDrops.com. There are currently over 4000 backdrops and 944 thumbnails for artists, so there's a good chance that some of your collection will return matches and save you some work. I've personally uploaded about 500 images to that site so far, and I know me and several other guys on the forums are all working to "artify" our various music collections and adding to HTBackdrops, so welcome to the club

[SleepyP]

The guy who runs HTBackdrops will give you FTP access and tell you how to use it, which will make it much easier when you need to bulk-upload. His username is Nuzecast, you can send him a PM...
http://forum.xbmc.org/member.php?action=...&uid=28343

[ECEC]

What scraper settings are people using to get the HTBackdrops to import? I run the AllMusic with only Enable Fanart and Grab Artist Thumbs From HTBackdrops but I never get any info.

The guy who runs HTBackdrops will give you FTP access and tell you how to use it, which will make it much easier when you need to bulk-upload. His username is Nuzecast, you can send him a PM...
http://forum.xbmc.org/member.php?action=...&uid=28343

Once downloaded, where do I need to put them in order for XBMC to recognize them as fanart? My file structure currently is

\\server\music\genre\artist - album\files

So I don't have a dedicated artist folder. Is there anyway for XBMC to point to a folder to look for that, or do I need to my folder structure.

[SleepyP]

XBMC pretty much requires per-artist folders for things to work "automagically".
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Music_Library
If you have a Fanart.jpg in an "album" folder, it will be used for that album (recent versions of XBMC do allow for album-level fanart as well as artist-level fanart).
So what I mean is like
\\server\music\genre\artist - album\fanart.jpg
will end up being used / displayed as the fanart for that album, NOT for that artist. you would need
\\server\music\genre\artist\fanart.jpg
for that. You COULD set them by hand, but that would be time consuming if your library is large.

[ECEC]

Well, that sucks for me, I guess. I guess since all of my tags and what not are good I can just do a bulk rename thing to switch over. Means I'm going to have redo my iTunes library, my wife's iTunes library....hmm...maybe fanart isn't worth it after all.

[SleepyP]

yeah it may not be worth the effort unless you're planning on using XBMC to browse / show off your music library. I only have about 80GB of my 230 GB collection done, but its sooooo sexy in XBMC. For iTunes shouldn't it just be a one-time re-scan of your library?

[ECEC]

yeah it may not be worth the effort unless you're planning on using XBMC to browse / show off your music library. I only have about 80GB of my 230 GB collection done, but its sooooo sexy in XBMC. For iTunes shouldn't it just be a one-time re-scan of your library?

No, unfortunately not. I don't have the entire collection (100gb or so) in iTunes, I just drag whatever I happen to want on my iPhone into iTunes and use various smart playlists to manage the content. If I add the entire collection, iTunes chugs and chugs.

Also, I want to keep my various metadata info (ratings, played count, etc) so all of my smart playlists keep working. I'm looking around for a solution now, we'll see what happens.

[SleepyP]

in that case, it shouldn't be too bad. XBMC only reads tags, it doesn't modify them at all, so they should be safe

[AddictedToMetal]

I'm trying to get my local art recognized as I've spent alot of time making it perfect. Take a look HERE. if you can help. I think the solution would make a nice addition to this thread.

On a side question, "fanart" is only the backdrops? Not covers or artist pics of any sort?

[SleepyP]

yes Fanart = 16:9 aspect ratio large resolution (720P or 1080P) images generally used as background art (though some media views display them in different ways).
And it looks like you solved your own issue (since your XML wasn't valid due to missing tags), so that makes things a bit easier I guess.

[AlexNC]

I ended up letting XBMC download all my Artist and Fanart images for my music. I already had all my tracks embedded with high quality Album art, so I skipped those. I am happy with the images XBMC downloaded, but I now see that they are located in some encrypted XBMC folder/file structure. I would like to export these images and have them saved under my Artist folder as the default 'folder.jpg' and 'fanart.jpg' to future proof it for later installations.

Any suggestions on exporting these images, or am I stuck manually finding them on the internet?

[64met]

ok... downloaded one image (Metallica) I see it in my music settings it is called Metallica.jpg. I have a folder Death Magnetic (Metallica Album)... so; how do I now move the jpeg file to the album file? Hopefully this makes sense.

Thxs

[SleepyP]

AlexNC, go to Music > Library > Export. Done and done
Met64, got your PM and replied