RSS Feed23 November 2008
Automatically Downloading Album Covers From Amazon Using Perl
I recently started using SqueezeCenter to stream music from my home computer to my computer at school. It has a nice AJAX web interface, and is a pretty slick system. The web interface will display cover art for each album. I've never cared about cover art before. At home, I use mplayer on the commandline to play my music, so I would never see the cover art. I keep my music meticulously organized into directories by artist and album, so I don't need a fancy music player with a library and such; in fact, those programs drive me absolutely insane. But, since SqueezeCenter can display album art, I suddenly wanted album art.
I found a few applications that download album art from Amazon, but none of them did exactly what I wanted. First, they would all try to download album art baesd on the artist and album found in each music file's tag. This doesn't work perfectly, especially since my music is in a multitude of formats (most of them non-MP3), and since I meticulously organize my music it's not necessary anyway. So that was problem one. Problem two is that they all wanted to either embed the cover art into the music file (fine, if excessive, for MP3s, but bad for other formats), or save the cover art somewhere based on the artist and album found in the tags. This was a big problem, since for much of my music the tags don't exactly match the directory names.