The Big Rip - Album Art
by Volker Weber
I am making good progress with The Big Rip. Tomorrow should be the final day, and then I have completed a task that was sitting on my to do list for a couple of years. :-)
What I have learned is that the Gracenote DB is now pretty good. I have not had one CD it would not recognize, even very odd ones like promotion CDs. What takes a little bit more time is the album art. Picking covers from Amazon does not give you good results. They have a lot of bad JPEGs there. It's better to search via Google Images.
However, in a comment to my last post, Miguel Augusto told me about CoverScout. I contacted Equinux and they let me try it out. All I can say is that it works a treat:
CoverScout scans multiple sources and ranks the results. You hit "Apply" and all tracks in an album are tagged. This is exactly what I wanted. Equinux also told me about another product that complements CoverScout: SongGenie works like Shazam and tries to identify mis-labelled tags. Have not tried that yet, because all the CDs I am ripping are carefully tagged.
Voilà: nicely tagged and with decent cover art.
Comments
It seems like you're lucky. CoverScout didn't work for me and the support of the guys was really bad.
http://www.domblog.de/domblog.nsf/d6plinks/TLAG-7NXT2R
Coverscout (and gracenote) failed for me for a a lot of odd albums (bachatas bought from the streets in Venezuela, or some Russian bards or old and odd compilations). But for the most of the rest it worked perfectly.
I envy you, i still have a couple of disks to finish yet. But i only work on this task since 1995
Thanks Volker for the great review!
@Thomas: it's a real shame you had a bad experience with CoverScout 3.0 and equinux at the start of the year.
Since then we've been working hard to improve CoverScout and our support and have been listening to all our customer feedback and suggestions. With the latest version of CoverScout we've improved overall compatibility, including network drive support.We'd love for you to give our software another go so we can prove to you that things @equinux have improved.
Volker, please let us know how itunes is performing with such a big library. My Music library is only ~130 GB, located on network attached drives. Itunes drives me nuts with its behaviour - not connecting automatically, forgetting locations, showing the coloured wheel every now and then etc. etc. (no, I am not using itunes on Windows, I do have a Mac).
130 GB is not "only". This is pretty large.
I am not using iTunes against a library of that size. My iTunes lib is usually smaller than 10 GB. Sonos sees the whole library, but Sonos keeps its own index.
Hm, maybe I should also take a few days off for a "big rip". I hesitate.
Axel, it’s the “network attached” bit that does it for iTunes. My library is around 52GB, and used to reside on my NAS. All the beach-balling got really tedious, so when I got a new Mac with a far bigger hard drive, I brought my iTunes library back down on to the machine. Performance is a lot better now. I heard once that iTunes file operations over a network are very inefficient—copying over the whole file every time you update tags, album art, etc. Well, I never bothered to check if that was true, but it certainly felt like it!
CoverScout works fine for my pop and rock CDs. But those are the minority in my collection. For most of the classical music (and also the jazz) it delivers simply nonsens so that I have to do the work manually. I know it's difficult since there are so many different recordings of one and the same piece. Would be a great thing if somebody found a solution for that ...
Thanks Volker and Ben for the hints about itunes - I never experienced to read such things in forums about itunes. Everybody there seems to be overly enthusiastic about this crippled progarm ...
Well, I have enough HD space on my Mac, however I want to access my lib from other PCs and devices and the MacBook Pro is not a good "server device". Besides my wife needs it for her work ...
Btw, MediaMonkey does the job much quicker even over the network - but it is not available on Mac.
And I understood your message, Volker. You almost catched another Sonos customer ...
thx for remindining me :-) I think it is time again to listen to the nice and wonderfull old music of yellow :-)
Volker, I discovered this yesterday, when I started ripping my classical. Useless.
@equinux Support
I tried it again and it worked. Maybe the new version did the job. Hopefully your support will be better in the future.
