Music library management

If you're an iTunes user, you may find that iTunes does not show album art for all of your music. A reason for this is that iTunes sources album art exclusively from the iTunes store. If your music isn't featured in the iTunes store, iTunes won't find the art. This is common for rarer releases, older releases, cover mounted CDs or bootlegs. It also affects music publishers who have not signed a deal with Apple, whether small (independent musicicans) or not so small (The Beatles!).

If art is missing, you need to either insert it manually (here's how) or use software like bliss to find the art and insert it for you. Here's a walkthrough of the latter.
First, here's our music in iTunes. We have missing art for "The Complete Collection" by Louis Armstrong and "Classical Tabla (Indian Drum) Interpretation" by Yusuf Mahmoud. Both albums were procured outside of the iTunes store and are not available within the store, and so iTunes does not have album art for them.
So we install and start bliss, and here's the settings we need. bliss chooses the default Windows music directory as a default, so we don't need to choose a different location. It's also important to embed the art so iTunes can find it later. Again, this is a default.
After applying the album art rule, bliss has located all the art and embedded it inside our music files.
Back in iTunes, we select all of our music... Either choose Edit > Select all or press [Ctrl] and [a] together.

Right click on all the selected albums and choose 'Get Info'.

Don't click any of the check boxes - just click 'OK'.

And finally we have our album art!

In the future, I'd like to streamline some of this in bliss. For instance, the latter stages where all of the albums are selected and you choose 'Get Info' could be avoided if bliss instructed iTunes it has updated the music files and to re-fetch the album art from the music files. If you want to see this kind of functionality, make a suggestion on the UserVoice pages.

That is how to use bliss to fix missing album art in iTunes.

This isn't about music library management per se, but it is about bliss. I just uploaded a customer/user testimonial page with some of the quotes from customers and users that I have gathered so far. Some of the praise has really put a smile on my face. Striving for a clean, correct, consistent digital music library seems to be a passion shared by many people!

I also created a couple of Delicious tags for bliss - bliss_press and bliss_testimonial.

Thanks for everyone's feedback!

Size matters. Some MP3 players don't show album art if it's too large. Some music lovers don't want album art that is too small.

If you have a large music collection, resizing album art can be a pain. You may have hundreds or thousands of albums for which the album art must be resized. Resizing all of those images is bad enough, but if the art is embedded in your music files you also need to extract the art from each track, resize it and then re-embed it. This is a tedious, time consuming task.

Resizing album art with bliss is simple. bliss is rule based, so with the album art rule you specify the constraints your album art should obey. Let's try an example where we shrink art to be no bigger than 300x300 pixels.

The bliss UI shows that our collection's art is currently compliant:
Here I've exposed the '(why?)' link for each of the top albums, to show the current size of my album art.

Now I set a rule that art should be no larger than 300x300 pixels. (bliss adds 10%, by the way, to make sure slightly larger art is not ignored when searching for alternative art).
We click 'Apply rule' to... apply the rule. bliss starts working through my music collection, resizing art that is over 300x300 pixels in size. Once complete, all art is reported as compliant:
Bulk resizing of album art with bliss is easy. Just set the size constraints and you're done. Changed your mind? Change the setting again, one click is all it takes. This is the power of rule based music management.

A customer found a problem viewing embedded art in iTunes which had been embedded by bliss into MP3s.

This is down to the way bliss embeds art into MP3s. The ID3v2 specification describes some information that should be stored with embedded art.

iTunes requires the MIME type of the art to include a subtype. Previously, bliss would embed art with just the MIME type "image". However, iTunes requires a more specific MIME type, such as "image/jpeg" or "image/png" depending on the type of the image.

I've fixed this, and the new build is under test by the customer in question. bliss now fully populates the MIME type, and for good measure populates the picture type of the art to 'type 3' - cover (front).

The build with this fix in will be available in ten days. Any other users wanting to try it out should get in touch and I'd be pleased to forward it onto them.

Why don't they make things easy for us?

I've heard a lot of good things about Winamp and wanted to try out some of the interesting music library information features. I decided to move a small iTunes music library into Winamp to give it a go.

The album art in my iTunes library was reasonably complete. I say reasonably... well it wasn't totally satisfactory:

I had already set up an iTunes Store account and so some of the album art had been found and displayed. Unfortunately this didn't include music not in the iTunes store, such as my rarer albums. I decided to see if Winamp would use my existing art and maybe even fill in the blanks.

So now it was time to install Winamp and take a look. I installed it, started it up and fantastic! It recognised I had an iTunes library and offered to import it. "Great", I thought, "this will import all my art too".

Now, the reality: this is what I got:

Alas, the import was not all it could've been. After importing my iTunes library I was greeted with one measly album art cover. The rest of my albums displayed an unwelcome although initially humorous monochrome image of a llama.

Earlier I gave you the main rule for finding album art in iTunes. Now there's the rule for managing album art in iTunes:

Album art is not stored in your music collection, art is stored in the iTunes database

This makes moving album art from iTunes elsewhere difficult. So: time to break out the big guns. I installed bliss, pointed it at the same music library, and told it to manage my album art.

A few seconds later, bliss had found and installed all four of the mainstream releases, fully automatically, and had found the correct art for the remaining two releases, for which it asked for my confirmation to install (presumably it found them on Google and so wasn't totally sure they were correct).

I restarted Winamp and, joy of joys, the album art bliss had found was visible:


I'm not sure why Winamp won't import album art from iTunes, and I don't know why when it can look up some of my albums it can't find other equally mainstream releases. What I did find out was how bliss helps you move your iTunes library to other players. Now, back to listening to the music...

Over the weekend, bliss got its first bit of press!

bliss was featured on the TuxRadar Podcast in their 'Discovery of the Week' section. Take a listen; our coverage starts at about 33:45 (mins:secs).

Graham Morrison highlighted the way bliss runs in the background and presents a Web interface:

"[bliss] grabs album covers for your music collection, and it does it automatically, it does it in the background and it does it with a Web interface and it's very cool if you happen to run a Squeezebox or keep your music collection on a big hard drive"

This is pertinent, because home servers and NASs running Linux and other operating systems are increasingly becoming the storage location for our music. If it's stored there and, in the case of centralised jukeboxes like Squeezebox, played from there, it makes sense to manage it from there too.

Here's to more good press!

A few people over the last few months have asked me "why the name 'bliss'?". Well, five months ago I had locked myself away for a day to decide on a name for this music management software I was writing.
I'll start by explaining the existing codename for the project alternated between 'AMT' (Automated Music Tagger) and 'Metadata-Sync'. As you can see, I needed something a little more catchy.

I wanted to solve my problems with managing large music libraries. My overwhelming feeling when struggling with my own collection was one of frustration and the mind boggling complexity of having to juggle and keep track of thousands of music files. For instance: how can I keep a consistent genre scheme across the library? And other similar questions. I wanted to invert the relationship: to manage my music in general rather than file by file. So as well as taking an opposite approach to music management, I wanted a name that was the opposite of frustration and struggle.

There were a few possibilities at this point under consideration. The three contenders were: Chorus, Harmony and Bliss.

What settled the argument in favour of the latter was a bit of idle Googling on the subject of classification systems. I found a pioneer of library classification systems was a fellow named Henry Evelyn Bliss. I see bliss becoming an automatic classifier and organiser, of sorts, and so that was settled. I'm afraid the relationship runs no deeper - any similarity between the way bliss works and Mr Bliss's classification system is purely co-incidental!

And that is why bliss is named as it is.

When it comes to album art, bigger is almost always better. Having a high quality, high resolution album cover to view on your computer or media centre is the least you want if you've spent time installing the art in the first place (but you could make it dead easy).

However, we don't always look at album art on big screens on high resolution displays. Sometimes we view album art on our portable MP3 players or mobile phones, which have much smaller screens. At best, having high resolution album art is a waste of space on mobile devices. At worst, the album art may not even display if the MP3 player cannot downscale (make smaller) the graphics.

So how to fix? Well, you could go through your hundreds of albums, extracting art, resizing it, re-embedding it......

Or you could enforce the album art size as a rule with bliss.

Use the settings screen to set your minimum and maximum sizes for art:

bliss will ensure all art in your collection conform to this rule. If art is too big, it will be resized. If it's too small, new art is looked up on the Web. All with a couple of clicks. And, of course, the same rules are applied automatically when you add new music, so you only need to configure once.

There you have it: complete album art, with more storage space for more music.

Since using bliss on my music collection I've enjoyed downloading art for recordings I didn't expect to.

My music collection contains many oddities that aren't standard album releases by mainstream artists. These include:

• Cover mounted CDs
• Music by independent musicians (REAL indies!)
• Podcasts
• Bootlegs (*ahem*)

A good example is a CD given to me at an Afghan wedding I attended. The CD was by a performer at the event, a classical tabla player. The CD came in a case with cover art, but being too lazy to scan the cover I never thought I'd see the art displayed on my Squeezebox. I was wrong! bliss found the art art on a blog using its Google search capability and installed it for me.

Another common example in my music collection are cover mounted CDs. In the UK a music magazine called 'Q' often offer compilations of tracks along a given theme, mounted on the front cover of the magazine. Previous examples were Essential Chill Out and The Best Tracks From The Best Albums Of 2000. Thankfully, art for these records is stored on the online database at discogs.org, which bliss searches, so this art was found automatically too!

It's been great to get a complete set of album art for all the odds-and-ends in my music collection. If you have trouble finding art for rare recordings, give bliss a try!

In the beginning (well, 2002 anyway), there was the computer. The computer was very useful. You could read and write documents, listen to music, play videos and reminisce with embarrassing old photographs.

Over time, all this data began to grow in size. It became difficult to fit it onto a hard disk on a standard computer. We began to want to backup the data, because losing precious music and photos would be A Bad Thing. Then, as we added more computers to our home in the shape of netbooks, smartphones and tablet computers, we wanted access to all this data from all these devices.

To solve this, we decided to centralise the data.

We moved all our data to computers responsible simply for data storage. These computers are called NASes (Network Attached Storage). They offered far higher capacities, could provide your documents, music, photos and video to whatever computer in your house requested it, and were easier to backup. They tended to run continuously at a low power draw, so as soon as you wanted your data, there it was. Now, companies like Buffalo, Linksys and LaCie make affordable, easy to use home NASes that provide all of these benefits.

This worked well until we found it wasn't just the data that we wanted to centralise in our homes, but the actual applications too. For instance, music streaming servers like Squeezebox and Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) like MythTV would work, in the background, while you got on with your life. This new wave appears just ready to break through. Microsoft's Windows Home Server product is a version of Windows that you can install on servers. Linux is another popular option amongst hobbyists, as is the Mac Mini.

Where does music management fit into this?

There's no reason why music management should be something a collector has to laboriously step through on a constant basis. If we define rules by which our music should be managed, music management can be done on a continual, fully automatic basis. When new music is added to the collection, rules kick-in to ensure that the music library is maintained in a consistent, complete and correct state. If the application of the rules is not certain, then we can ask a human via normal methods such as email or a Web interface, as humans are great at creativity and problem solving.

So, the result is much less time tagging and more reliable and consistent results.

bliss is written to run on a home server.

This is why it has a web interface, so that it can be reached from anywhere in your home network. It is also why, most importantly, it applies the rules you define when new music is added to your collection. This way, you dictate the rules, and bliss does all the hard work.

Where will home data storage go next? Some say 'the cloud', a vague, loaded term that tends to refer to online storage of data over the Internet (and lots more besides). While this is an excellent solution for a number of reasons, as yet such an infrastructure is not capable of storing data in all its guises, for instance the lossless music beloved of audiophiles is simply too large both in terms of the capacity required to hold it and the bandwidth required to upload/download.

It'll be interesting to see in what directions home servers go, but so far it appears it will make music library management quicker and more accurate.