Album Art Aggregator

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• Questions & Comments
• How to use it
• Features
• Notes

Download album cover art for your music collection.

I originally made this program because I couldn't find any quick way to get the album cover art for my music collection. I posted it on Hydrogen Audio assuming that some people might be able to get some use out of it, and to my surprise it became relatively popular. So I cleaned it up, added a few features, and — ta-da — a little program to get the cover art for your music collection.

Download (February 19, 2006)

There is no install, just unzip and run. (Requires the .NET Framework version 1.1 or higher to function.)

Older Versions

If for some reason you're interested in older versions of the program, here you go:

Questions, Comments, Bugs, etc...

All comments should be directed to the Hydrogen Audio thread:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=29876

Features

This is just a collection of new features that were added in various versions. It makes a nice "feature" list.

Run: AlbumArtAggregator.exe "search string" "path to save resulting image"
(e.g. AlbumArtAggregator.exe "Arcade Fire - Funeral" "D:\Music\CDs\Albums\Arcade Fire\Funeral (2004)\cover.jpg")
If no album cover is found with the given search there will be no notification and nothing will be saved to the given filename.

Expand all, contract all, and show albums that currently have no cover art saved.

If no cover images were found, you can can change the values for artist and album and search again.

You can see the dimensions of the currently saved image and also have the option of deleting it, which I know was another requested item.

The custom directory structure thingy is much more efficient now and also included two new parameters. One for junk strings in the folder name, and one for optional folders (for the guy who had "\disc1" and "\disc2" under some albums but not all of them).

Notes

These are just some things that have been brought up in the Hydrogen Audio thread and I though I would list them here so people don't have to read a whole forum thread to find the information:

• The images are gathered from amazon.com. I have considered adding support for other sites (like Wal-mart—which has been requested many times) but Amazon makes it easy to get information from them through web services and no other site I know of does this. So unless someone finds another site which offers album covers through a web service, Amazon will remain the only source of images. But if you do find such a site let me know.

• You have to search for covers one at a time (as opposed to grabbing the covers for all your albums at once) because Amazon has rules which limit the number of requests that I can make per second. If you got all the covers at once it would easily surpass that maximum limit. So this is Amazon's restriction, not mine (the first version of the program actually did get all the covers at once, but that had to be changed rather quickly).

• Link to this page all you like. I've seen mention of the program in incredibly random places (considering the only place I've mentioned it is HA) and have no problem with that. If you would like to tell people about this program, all I ask is that you provide a link to this page and not directly to the download. My website URL is in the titlebar of the program though, so if for some reason you can't provide a link to this page, providing the complete .zip file is acceptable.

• The image file is saved on your harddrive in JPG format in the directory of the selected album. No changes are made to your music files and nothing is written to any metadata tags (ID3 tags, etc.). Nor are your music files ever even accessed, this program only looks at your directory structure so the format or type or number of music files for any given album is of no matter.

  • (But on the other hand, this means that the program will be utterly useless to people with a massive folder folder containing all their music in a single directory. Organize yourselves people!)

• Control+Shift+D opens the Console window which shows debuggingish info. This is written to the file error.log so if the program crashes, copy the contents of that file and post it to the comments and bugs thread.

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