Manually putting files in the Album Covers folder

  1. anonymous

    Can I manually put album covers into the Album Covers folder? What is the naming format?

    I ask because I have jpegs of album covers for all my mp3s, but prefer to not embed the cover into each mp3 file and waste space.

    --cosmeg

  2. anonymous

    Seriously, I don't see why we cannot do this. I tried once downloading artwork off of Amazon and then renaming it (and adding a renamed plist file to go with it), but it didn't work. Has anyone figured this out?

    Wincent, if you are out there, can you PLEASE address the album covers issue? Just make a drag and drop editor for album covers or something while Amazon is unavailable.

    I realize that I paid only $5 for Synergy in the first place. Wincent priced it too low, considering how good the idea is. My call to Wincent: I will pay $15 (and maybe more) to get my album covers back.

    We all remember the move from Australia, and the software-up-to-date probem with Panther. But the time has come for a fix for the album covers issue, and not just updates with new buttons. Or beta release Synergy Advance!

    Barky

  3. anonymous

    Just to clarify what I'm looking for, I just want to know if *I* can do something in the interim to get things to work. (And I'll be willing to do a little legwork if necessary.) While "a drag and drop editor for album covers or something" would ultimately be nice, that's not what this question is about.

    --cosmeg

  4. anonymous

    Actually, I went back and was able to do it--I must have screwed something up the last time.

    All you really need to do is follow the labelling convention Wincent uses--look in library/application support/synergy and you'll find the album covers. Download a picture off of Amazon (or scan it), export it as a tiff, follow the naming convention and you should be set to go. I'm not sure if you need the associated plist file (probably). All I did was copy a plist file and renamed it to follow the album cover file--I didn't change the contents.

    I am not sure, but I think the file format has to be tiff, but you can try jpegs on your own.

    Barky

  5. anonymous

    You do not need to include the plist file. The indexing system is not case sensitive (remember to take out all spaces) but it does want some of the punctuation marks in there--I just loaded in Cud's delightful When In Rome, Kill Me--and Synergy would not recognize the file without the comma in "Rome, Kill" since it listed that way in the iTunes library. However, I also put in The Cure's "Galore: The Singles 19XX-19YY" and it required the dash but did not grumble when I took out the colon (OSX didn't like the colon).

    So, I take back all of my grumbling about a drag and drop editor; this is really easy. But I still could use a real upgrade, and I'm willing to pay real money for it!

    Barky

  6. anonymous

    Thanks for the help barky, but could you describe the naming convention? (My Album Covers folder is empty.)

    --cosmeg

  7. anonymous

    Sure--it's easy.

    As I said in my earlier post, there are a few things to consider:

    1) not case sensitive 2) no spaces EVER 3) some punctuation is required if included in the tags used by iTunes. Commas, dashes, apostrophes, parentheses--but, evidently, not colons (OSX doesn't like them?). Periods still go in (I had a title that was "The Best of..." and the ellipsis was required for it to work), as do accents. 4) seem to need to be tiff files. I have not tried it as jpegs, but... 5) the plist files (which you don't have, since your albums folder is empty, but I have a bunch) seem to be reference files so that you can "Buy Now" from Amazon. No need for you to include.

    Anyway, here is the naming convention. Track for which there IS an album name listed in iTunes: Artist-ManicStreetPreachers,Album-GenerationTerrorists.tiff ^^^^^^so, Artist-XXXXX,Album-XXXXXXX.tiff--the comma has to be in there, as do the dashes.

    For a song listed WITHOUT an album: Artist-JohnnyCash,Song-IWalkTheLine.tiff

    I think that's it. I am using the last version (not the one that came out today, 2/6/04). It should work for you, too.

    I have spent about 1.5 hours adding covers to my collection. It's a sickness.

    Hope you enjoy,

    Barky

  8. anonymous

    Fantastic, thanks for all the help Barky. Everything is working great (I'm using an older version too right now).

    Interestingly enough, jpeg images *do* seem to work, but only if they are named with a .tiff extension.

    As for the colon issue, it is the path delimiter from the classic Mac OS (like "/" is in unix and "\" is under Windows). So for obvious reasons filenames can't contain a colon.

    Quote: I have spent about 1.5 hours adding covers to my collection. It's a sickness.

    I have "cover.jpg" files in each of my album folders and I might try to whip up a perl script to manually populate this Album Covers folder, but that is probably more easily said than done.

    Thanks again,

    --cosmeg

  9. Greg Hurrell

    Quote: Interestingly enough, jpeg images *do* seem to work, but only if they are named with a .tiff extension.

    Eek. That's a bug. Jpegs are supposed to work, and with a ".jpg" extension!

    The comments about the naming conventions are pretty much spot on so far. Here's a description of the naming algorithm as it currently stands. It all depends on which ID3 tags you have defined for a given song:

    In each of the following cases, replace the "XXXX" with the info from the appropriate ID3 tag:

    If Album and Artist are defined, use: Artist-XXXX,Album-XXXX

    Otherwise, if Song and Artist are defined, use: Artist-XXXX,Song-XXXX

    Otherwise, if Album is defined, use: Album-XXXX

    Otherwise, if Song is defined, use: Song-XXXX

    Then we get rid of whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines) and path separators ("/" and ":"), and add our ".tiff" extension, and that's it.

    As one of the posters above commented, no need for the plist file. That's just for Amazon integration.

    The algorithm isn't perfect, but it does the job fairly well in most cases (compilation albums are a notable exception, where you often end up with a different file for every song on the album). You just have to be sure that your file names match up exactly with the information in your ID3 tags, otherwise Synergy won't find them.

    For Synergy Advance, I plan much more sophisticated album cover management, which will make painful manual exercises such as this unnecessary, as well as enabling a lot of other cool stuff.

  10. brutesentiment

    For those who would like a 'drag and drop' feature, they can do such a thing within iTunes.

    Just open the 'Artwork' window, and find songs that have no artwork. You can then drag any image (jpeg, tiff, etc) to that window and Presto! Synergy now looks for this artwork and uses it if it's there.

    You can even select multiple songs, and drag and drop one piece for an entire album that way.

    The downside is that the artwork is saved within the id tags of each song, so the space it takes up can grow quickly. If you use jpegs rather than tiffs, this can be minimized, but if you have a full iPod, this may not be the method for you.

  11. anonymous

    you can use fetch art to add most album covers to itunes, which synergy will find.

  12. Deckard

    Quote: The downside is that the artwork is saved within the id tags of each song, so the space it takes up can grow quickly. If you use jpegs rather than tiffs, this can be minimized, but if you have a full iPod, this may not be the method for you.

    Which begs the question: Why does Synergy convert images to .tiff files at all? They take up so much more space, and if they're imbedded in the file, the added space they use can mount quickly. Until Synergy uses Amazon's .jpg files by default or at least gives the option to, I'm not interested in trying it. Perhaps it does already, and the .tiff format is just default behavior, but I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere.

  13. Greg Hurrell

    Quote: Which begs the question: Why does Synergy convert images to .tiff files at all?

    Because it's the most "native" image format in Cocoa. I'm going to use jpegs by default in Synergy Advance.

    [On a side note, the larger size of tiffs hasn't presented much a problem for me in this day and age of 250 gig hard drives, but I can understand that some users are much more sensitive about this, hence the change in Synergy Advance.]

    Sorry that you don't want to try out Synergy. You are missing out!

  14. anonymous

    If only my powerbook and ipod had cheap 250gig hard drives

  15. Greg Hurrell

    Quote: If only my powerbook and ipod had cheap 250gig hard drives

    My one and only machine is a PowerBook with a 40 gig drive, and I don't have an iPod. My Synergy Album Covers folder takes up 129 meg on the drive (a third of one percent). I admit that I only have a small music library: 447 songs, 27 albums, just under 2 gig.

  16. anonymous

    Wow! It surprises me you have such a small music library considering you developed Synergy.

  17. Greg Hurrell

    Quote: Wow! It surprises me you have such a small music library considering you developed Synergy.

    My machine back home was a desktop machine with about 400 gigs of disk space; I used to collect a lot of media, music included. I had more music than I could ever realistically hope to listen to.

    But a twist in my life meant that I wound up overseas without a computer in September last year, and eventually got the PowerBook with the 40 gig drive. So not only does that mean that I can't have a large music library, even if I did, I'd be listening to it through the tiny laptop speakers... such is life. I am hoping that I can save the money to get a proper desktop machine at the end of the year (well, hoping that Apple will finally announce and ship new G5s; dual 3Ghz machines or something like that).

  18. anonymous

    Quote: So not only does that mean that I can't have a large music library, even if I did, I'd be listening to it through the tiny laptop speakers... such is life.

    First thing I'd do is buy a decent pair of headphones, or some computer speakers!

  19. Bill

    Is there any way to put in a wild card? I have a lot of live and rare stuff that I don't have a album name or i use that date of the concert (album-live*wildcard*.tiff). I'd like to use a file name that allowed the picture to show up when ever a particular word showed up in the album or artist no matter what the other fields have in them.

  20. Greg Hurrell

    Quote: Is there any way to put in a wild card? I have a lot of live and rare stuff that I don't have a album name or i use that date of the concert (album-live*wildcard*.tiff). I'd like to use a file name that allowed the picture to show up when ever a particular word showed up in the album or artist no matter what the other fields have in them.

    Something like this is going to be under the "Advanced" preferences tab of Synergy Advance, except instead of simply wildcards it will allow you to use a more sophisticated regex syntax.

  21. anonymous

    I prefer to manually add artwork to my files in iTunes, but instead of displaying that cover Synergy attempts (& fails) to download one from Amazon (So all I get is the Synergy icon).

    Is there a way to get Synergy to display the cover art that is already stored on the music file? rather than downloading from Amazon.

  22. Greg Hurrell

    Synergy currently (version 1.4) does the following:

    1. Checks to see if it has already downloaded art. 2. If no art has been downloaded, checks iTunes for art. 3. If iTunes doesn't have art, searches on Amazon.

    If the wrong art has been downloaded and you've subsequently added the correct art to iTunes you'll have to delete the incorrect art.

    Version 1.5 will have a new preference setting where you can tell it to:

    (a) Check iTunes and Amazon for album art; or: (b) Check only iTunes.

    The search order will still be the same (1, 2, 3), but the difference is that when you have it set to "Check only iTunes" it will never do step 3.

    The floater will also display more feedback about what's happening; it will indicate whether it is searching for art, or no art found etc, instead of just showing the Synergy icon.

  23. anonymous

    Quote: The floater will also display more feedback about what's happening; it will indicate whether it is searching for art, or no art found etc, instead of just showing the Synergy icon.

    Great! That will be a very useful addition.

  24. anonymous

    this embedding of jpg's in mp3 files, is this allowed in the mp3 file format specification ? if so does someone know where i can find this spec. and if other file types can be embedded in mp3 ?

  25. Greg Hurrell

    Quote: Version 1.5 will have a new preference setting

    Just thought I'd better note here that this preference didn't make it into 1.5.

  26. anonymous

    Is there no way to make synergy either use JPGs by default (i like having covers, but i dont like having a 120MB cover art folder) .... or at least making it store the covers somewhere else (like the appropriate album's folder, OR some other place (like another partition in another volume)? Im totally willing to manually edit something in the package if necessary...

  27. Greg Hurrell

    Quote: Is there no way to make synergy either use JPGs by default (i like having covers, but i dont like having a 120MB cover art folder) .... or at least making it store the covers somewhere else (like the appropriate album's folder, OR some other place (like another partition in another volume)? Im totally willing to manually edit something in the package if necessary...

    Synergy does use JPGs by default (or at least it has for some time now). If you want to store the covers somewhere else then replace the album covers folder with an alias or symlink. Do not replace the "Temporary Album Covers" folder, because, as the name suggests, it is temporary only and Synergy will delete it on exit anyway.

  28. anonymous

    Is there a quick and easy way to transfer downloaded album art into iTunes?

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