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.

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.

What are the best websites for album art? Nowadays I, like most people, want to enjoy album art as a part of the whole album experience. I want high quality album art and I want it part of my listening experience.

Of course, bliss already automatically retrieves album art when it is missing from my collection. However, some people prefer to look manually, and some people, including myself, just enjoy browsing the wealth of history's album covers. If you are wondering what websites can provide album art, I hope the suggestions in this blog post help you find what you are looking for.

I've found that the quality of album art from any particular website varies inversely proportional to the chances of finding the art you are looking for. That is, there's a quality/quantity trade-off. This is because some websites operate strict control policies over the album art that is submitted which keeps quality up but quantity down.

To combat the quality/quantity trade-off I operate a sequential checklist of websites, starting with those of highest quality and working my way down.

I start with Album Art Exchange which has some beautiful album covers. The art is generally of a large size, so it is easily reusable for different applications, whether on a mobile phone or on a big-screen TV. bliss doesn't search Album Art Exchange just yet as there isn't an API, but I'd love it to.

Next it's MusicBrainz, a generalised music database that links to Amazon for its album art. MusicBrainz submission policy is more open than Album Art Exchange, so there are a lot more albums recorded in it. MusicBrainz's link to Amazon means the latter is responsible for storing the album art, and for many releases this means a good range of art including back covers. bliss searches both MusicBrainz and Amazon.

Discogs is my next site. Like MusicBrainz, Discogs is a general music database and operates a community model. The difference with Discogs is that it appears to operate a more open definition of what constitutes a 'release' and so you get more unofficial releases such as cover mounted CDs and bootlegs.

Finally, if I haven't found a match yet, I tend to use Google image search, followed by Yahoo image search. You have to be careful with the results, because art of all sizes and qualities are returned. bliss searches Google as a fallback option, but never installs art from Google automatically because there's too high a chance that it will be incorrect.

Although I use them less frequently directly, it's also worth mentioning maniadb and AllCDCovers.

If you still can't find the art, it's probably not available on the Web, so it's time to get the scanner out (and don't forget to submit your art to the sites above so others can benefit from your work!).

And that is how I search for album art.

All of the pictures of doubtless rare album covers in this blog post were provided by get directly down.

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!

Music files, like MP3s and other formats, contain 'tags' which indicate the name of the track, the album from which the track comes and so on. The quality of these tags in your music files affect the ease and accuracy of automated album art download. The ideal tags are to have the album name tag populated with just the album name and likewise for the fields that describe the artist.

In the real world, however, I encounter polluted tags all the time. Very common examples are extra characters to denote multi disc albums ("Disc one" or similar). More exotic variations exist, such as adding the year of release to the album name, or the record label.

These tagging approaches may be less than ideal, but they exist. bliss has to work with them.

bliss copes with existing 'bad' tags in two ways:

1. It manipulates the tag to improve the likelihood of an accurate match
   
2. It uses 'fallback' sources for art (such as Google) with a higher likelihood of match which are presented to you to double check

With these approaches bliss manages lots of automatic cover art installations. In addition, it works with your existing art. So, say if you have a rare recording with art not found on the Web, it will use that existing artwork to make sure your music collection follows the rules you've defined. Maybe it will embed the art in your music files, if it isn't already.

Give bliss a try by downloading and let us know how you get on!

bliss is almost ready for release. Our intrepid beta testers and I have been throwing it all at bliss over the past few weeks. We've found some bugs and also the time to add some extra features.

I thought it was a good time to show you how bliss manages album art for my music collection

I want my music collection to contain album art. I want it all embedded in the music files, and I want it all saved in a file prefixed 'cover' (this is a Squeezebox thing). I don't care about the size of the art, but I'd rather have something.

All these requirements are defined in bliss's cover art 'rule'. Here's how it looks:
Now I click 'Apply', and away goes bliss! bliss finds existing art in the library and makes sure it is embedded. Sometimes there is no art, but it finds it automatically (by downloading it from the Web) and then embeds it...


Some it isn't sure about, because either the tag doesn't describe the album properly or it's a rare recording, so bliss asks me...

And it's done! That took a fraction of the time it used to take. No searching through Google or Amazon. No using a tag editor to embed the image I found in each file.

The best bit? If I change how I want my album art stored I just change the rule and let bliss do all the work!

Reminds me of a song...

On 15th June 1979, New Order released Unknown Pleasures. Much is known of the subsequent impact and influence of the music, but almost as highly lauded was the cover art on the record sleeve. The designer, Peter Saville, had added the record to the long line of music album covers that stand both of the music, complementing it, but also as a work of art in its own right.

There are many other examples. Sir Peter Blake's cover for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is one, another is Andy Warhol's cover for The Velvet Underground and Nico. The point is that music's packaging is an important aspect of a record's artistic contribution. While it might be the music we hear and remember, a record's artwork should complement and enhance the overall artistic experience.

But considering the nature of digital music; distributed with no physical form, it stands to reason that the popularity of digital music formats may see the death of cover art. If there is no physical form to distribute, where does the art go? Indeed, Peter Saville himself has opined such a thought. Yet, it doesn't seem to be going away. Digital music players continue to show album art to sate our visual appetites, just as our aural ones are satisfied.

It seems cover art is viewed as important by music lovers, whether their music is vinyl or MP3.

And yet despite this popularity, problems remain.

One of the chief issues is inconsistency of approach across digital music players. Some players expect artwork embedded in the digital file containing the music itself. iTunes works in this way. Some require the images to be stored separately. Different music file formats, which store the music in different ways, also treat the cover art differently. The players that support each file format maintain different ways of retrieving the art from each file format.

This leads us to the complex conclusion that the 'right' way of managing cover art depends on both the music players you use (including portable players), the file formats you use and the combinations therein.

'Tagging' tools exist that know how to write into the digital music files and allow you to replicate the scheme required by your player(s). This means, where a whole album needs to be changed, many individual edits of each track in the album. This is laborious, time consuming and prone to error.

Then there's also the problem of getting the art in the first place. Some players have an automated download facility built in but this is often unreliable and depends on the quality of any existing tagging of the music. Others do nothing and it is up to the user to retrieve the artwork.

bliss solves the cover art complexity problems.

bliss manages cover art by working in the background and looking for music that has no artwork already associated. It does not require you to tell it to look for artwork, it will do it for you. It attempts to download the artwork that is missing, making a best guess and if not sure will present you with a few options. It uses the MusicBrainz database to achieve a high degree of accuracy. It saves the artwork in the manner which best works with your music player, or potentially in multiple different ways if you use more than one player. Furthermore the bliss interface allows you to work with your music, not music files. This means changing the cover art for an album, should you want to do so, is a case of selecting the album and not a loosely connected bunch of computer files as some other tools mandate.

bliss allows a highly reliable cover art experience with zero effort from you.