2013-07-29, 04:24
cdART continues to be THE app for getting your music collection into shape for XBMC. There's only two outstanding niggles that, for me could be improved upon to make it perfect.
Firstly, scanning your music library with cdART takes a long time. I know this isn't the fault of cdART, more to do with limitations on the MusicBrainz website, and having the ability to specify a custom mirror goes someway to negating that limitation, so kudos for that. But for those of us who run multiple installs of XBMC and would like to be able to update our artwork on each system we run, it's an arduous task because the time it takes to scrape/update our libraries through cdART is then multiplied multiple times.
For me it would make sense to have an NFO-style file saved with the artwork in the custom artwork folder (if defined, if not with the albums / music itself) that saves any/all information cdART is able to gather about our music collections, so it's then much easier to update our cdART databases on multiple machines, and/or make rescanning our libraries faster when a reformat or re-install of XBMC/cdART on the primary machine is performed.
The second issue is that, for me I store album covers in a "folder.jpg" with the music, but also embed the artwork into the MP3 tags themselves for compatibility with devices that do not support folder.jpg files because my media libray location is on a NAS that is accessed by multiple applications / devices besides XBMC. So having an option to replace the embedded artwork in a file with the updated artwork cdART downloads would save a lot of time/effort re-factoring my music collection when updated / higher quality artwork is downloaded. I would say I don't think such an option (if included) should be "on-by-default", but would be a nice time saver for those of us with larger collections. Updating embedded artwork for 22,000 MP3 files is not a task I want to be doing manually.
Other than that, a great add-on and an XBMC essential app IMHO.
Firstly, scanning your music library with cdART takes a long time. I know this isn't the fault of cdART, more to do with limitations on the MusicBrainz website, and having the ability to specify a custom mirror goes someway to negating that limitation, so kudos for that. But for those of us who run multiple installs of XBMC and would like to be able to update our artwork on each system we run, it's an arduous task because the time it takes to scrape/update our libraries through cdART is then multiplied multiple times.
For me it would make sense to have an NFO-style file saved with the artwork in the custom artwork folder (if defined, if not with the albums / music itself) that saves any/all information cdART is able to gather about our music collections, so it's then much easier to update our cdART databases on multiple machines, and/or make rescanning our libraries faster when a reformat or re-install of XBMC/cdART on the primary machine is performed.
The second issue is that, for me I store album covers in a "folder.jpg" with the music, but also embed the artwork into the MP3 tags themselves for compatibility with devices that do not support folder.jpg files because my media libray location is on a NAS that is accessed by multiple applications / devices besides XBMC. So having an option to replace the embedded artwork in a file with the updated artwork cdART downloads would save a lot of time/effort re-factoring my music collection when updated / higher quality artwork is downloaded. I would say I don't think such an option (if included) should be "on-by-default", but would be a nice time saver for those of us with larger collections. Updating embedded artwork for 22,000 MP3 files is not a task I want to be doing manually.
Other than that, a great add-on and an XBMC essential app IMHO.
