Album art download question

[SVoyager]

Hello, quick question but first gotta say that 5.5 is absolutly fabulous. The past years i had to can winamp since it didnt had some of the feature i wanted but now it can defenatly become my main player but one major issue remains.

My question is about the album art downloading. Proper handeling of album art is required for me and it seems quite a few of the artists i listen to cant be found for album covers.

Where does winamp download the covers??? is there a way to switch servers? (if no, is that a planned feature??).

My current player is itunes unfortunatly. Rather slow and memory hungry. It did however handle all the album arts i asked it to get. Im defenatly not having that success rate with winamp.

I am aware that i could manually get the album arts and name them propedly to winamps standards (but that kinda kills the point of having a download option). I must say that im a bit lazy on that part and i got used to the "download album art" of itunes and not having to do anything else.

Anything to do for winamp to download the album arts??

Alot of the artists i listen to are european with charaters like åäö but that didnt stop itunes from handling them.

thx in advance 4 the help
SV

[DJ Egg]

Yeah, I'm not sure if the downloader handles non-English characters too well at the moment. Hopefully we can get that fixed/implemented for 5.51....

Currently, Winamp connects to client.winamp.com, which then redirects to coverart.music.aol.com which uses the amg database from allmusic.com

art images are saved as %album%.jpg (where %album% is the title of the album) in the containing folder (ie. where the corresponding music files are located).

There is no config implemented yet for album art (eg. where to look locally, what filenames to save images as, etc etc).

More info in the Notes in the 5.5 Released thread

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=278538#notes

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?postid=2251651#post2251651

[Damaeus]

I found the moderator's info to be true through experimentation. I listen to a lot of music that's just not on the database. I scan all my CD covers and store them on my hard drive, so I have local images of all my CDs.

WinAmp seems to look at the ID3 tag and get the album title. So if you have a local image you can check the ID3 tag and make the filename of the image the same as the title found in the ID3 tag, and it is case-sensitive.

I was sort of miffed to find that only 3 of Sting's albums have cover art online, and I'd rather use my own scans, anyway, because mine are perfectly square (300x300), while the downloaded ones are sizes like 200 x 195, 200 x 198, 200 x 196, etc...

Now I just need to find out if it's possible to have the album art displayed at 300 x 300.

Damaeus

[DJ Egg]

The only place where you can get it show at 300x300 or larger is in the Bento skin, when the playlist window is expanded to full length.

Go to: Main menu > Options > Playlist, and checkmark "Show album art if playlist is enlarged".

You can then drag the horiz separator to resize the image.

[J_Darnley]

You can also get the cover to show at any size if you use the Winamp Modern skin and have the Album Art window shown.

[Forkboy2]

Cover & Tag Plugin will display album art of any size in WinAmps Video window. If you have multiple image files (front, back, booklet, etc.) the plugin will cycle through them or tile and display all at once.

Make sure to get latest version from author's website.

http://www.angelfire.com/blog/richter/

[fdagon]

I have the same problem as SVoyager, most of the searches i do for covers give nothing. I hoped the new version 5.52 would be better but not so, i searched for jean michel jarre's oxygene and got no result. DJ Egg said that it searches in allmusic.com database but this cover do exist there but Winamp does not find it. The info on this perticular file is following:

Artist Jean Michel Jarre
Album Oxygene

that should be enough to find the cover. It must be something wrong how winamp searches for the cover as I'm able to find it on the same site (not that allmusic.com is any good but..)

[jedikalimero]

Originally posted by fdagon
I have the same problem as SVoyager, most of the searches i do for covers give nothing. I hoped the new version 5.52 would be better but not so, i searched for jean michel jarre's oxygene and got no result. DJ Egg said that it searches in allmusic.com database but this cover do exist there but Winamp does not find it. The info on this perticular file is following:

Artist Jean Michel Jarre
Album Oxygene

that should be enough to find the cover. It must be something wrong how winamp searches for the cover as I'm able to find it on the same site (not that allmusic.com is any good but..)

Cover download used to work for me so-so but a few weeks ago it stopped to work at all. Any search returns zero results, even extremely popular searchs like "Michael Jackson" "Thriller" doesn't appear to work at all. It just says "Search failed" in the bottom of the window