I have been messing with my music collection today (in my lunch hour of
course). I spent time making sure that each MP3 and WMA file in my
collection contains the correct song title, artist name, and album
title (where possible)
ID3v2
tags. I also went through the painstaking effort of adding rankings to
each song title; so I could play all my favorite 5 star rated files from the
auto play list in
Windows Media Player.
I have a complete copy of my music collection on my home network, as
well as at the office, and I have rigged up my
Media Center
to play the
lot. It works really well, MCE picks up all my play lists and enables me
to thumb through my collection by album, artist of title. What's
missing is the album art. When at the office I'm typically listening to
music while writing software, and the only picture I'm looking at is
Visual Studio.
However, when at home, I'm pumping the sounds through my stereo TV (as
well as my sub woofer) and the MCE screen displays the default logo for
the album info of each track played. Of course, I can always turn on
visualizations if I want a pretty picture, but I'd much rather see the
album cover of the song I'm listening to.
I checked the Internet for plug-ins for Windows Media Player and MCE
2005 to download and display album art but I didn't exactly find what
I'm looking for. I'm looking for some software that will use at least
the artist name and title of a song to retrieve missing information from
Freedb.org. Once the album name has
been determined, the software should contact an on-line store, such as
Amazon.com, and download the album art before adding it as an ID3v2 tag.
I think I'll be searching for a long while before an application or
plug-in becomes available to perform what I describe above. So, I
figure I can write an application myself. It shouldn't be too difficult
to pull out ID3v2 tag information from MP3 and WMA files, and
Freedb.org provides examples to search and download song information.
Amazon.com
provides a web service to download album cover art (they do for books,
so I'm hoping they do for CDs). I'll need to embed some logic in my app
for tracks in my collection that are missing album titles and belong to
multiple albums. The rest should be fairly simple to implement.
Watch this blog to see if I succeed in my plan......