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Feature request #8: REQUEST: Embed album art in track file

Kind feature request
Product Synergy
When Created , updated
Status closed
Reporter Greg Hurrell
Tags no tags

Description

From a user email: "I am writing to request that the download of cover art be extended to allow embedding of the art directly in the mp3. This would allow me use of the cover art in other programs, including iTunes itself, such as Toast 6 (when creating an mp3 DVD) and G-Force (display album art when using the Visualizer.)"

Comments

  1. Greg Hurrell

    Marking as ASSIGNED.

  2. Greg Hurrell
    • ** Bug 38 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
  3. Greg Hurrell

    For those who are manually copying art to iTunes, I just wanted to note here that the easiest way to do this is to select "Show Album Covers folder" from the Synergy Global menu while the relevant track is playing. This will not only open the folder, but also select the actual cover art file in the Finder, making the task of dragging the art file into iTunes a little easier.

  4. reppep

    This would make the iPod photo work as well.

    See https://wincent.dev/a/support/forums/showthreaded.php?Cat=0&Number=572

  5. Marius van Wyk

    Dragging Album art manually from the Folder into the mp3s is quite a time-consuming task. Automating this would save me hours.

    This is by far the most important feature I practically cannot do without.

    Please, please make provision for this...

    regards,

  6. Greg Hurrell
    • ** Bug 140 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
  7. Greg Hurrell

    This is obviously a fairly popular feature request. What needs to be decided is *how* to implement this from a user interface perspective. There are a number of options:

    1. Embed artwork automatically (always). The problem here is that Synergy sometimes gets the wrong art from Amazon and it would be annoying to have to remove the art manually if it were wrong. There would also need to be a mechanism in which Synergy would know not to re-embed the art if the user deleted it and the next time the track was played Synergy noticed that it had no embedded art... It's quite a complicated issue...

    2. Embed art when a hot key is pressed. This corrects many of the problems with option "1" above, but there is currently no room for more hot keys in the Synergy preferences UI (I have to keep the window small enough that it will fit on an 800 x 600 iBook screen). Synergy Advance has a totally different UI and the number of possible hot keys is unlimited.

    3. Embed art when an item in the Synergy Global Menu is selected. This is the easiest to implement in terms of not breaking the existing UI, and for my part it's the approach I favour most.

    4. Embed art when album cover as shown in the floater is clicked. This would require significant tweaking to the floater because it's currently "transparent" to mouse clicks. Also, the cover art would have to appear inside an NSButton (currently it's just drawn in directly in -drawRect:).

    or:

    5. Embed art when album cover as shown in floater is right-clicked (or control clicked, or clicked-and- held) and an item is selected from a contextual menu. Once again, significant tweaking required, but I favour this approach over option "4" because it's less likely that a user might click the art by accident and embed it without meaning to. I also like the way that having a contextual menu in place opens up a path towards other features that could be controlled from inside the floater. This is an approach I have in mind for Synergy Advance.

    6. A separate application for managing cover art, as suggested in bug #140. This is one of the things which Synergy Advance will be.

    In an ideal world, *all* of these options would be possible and the user could choose to activate/ deactivate the methods according to their taste. Realistically though, I am suffering from UI crunch in Synergy Classic and it's hard to add more options. My vote goes with option "3" for now. Comments anyone?

  8. Eerk

    Since you list options, I take it that the ability to get artwork into the iTunes file is not your problem. Just the way to implement it in the current interface. 

      "My vote goes with option "3" for now."

    Although a hot key would be much better, I understand your problem getting it into the current interface. IMHO You could get rid of the hot key to quit Synergy though. That is something you will only do rarely (in my use of Synergy the only reason ever to quit Synergy was to test a new version and I used the Preference Pane 'Stop' button for that).

    If you do go for the global menu approach, make sure to have at least the following options: "Embed artwork for [name of currently playing song] in iTunes" "Embed artwork for [name of currently playing album] in iTunes" "Remove aftwork for [name of currently playing album] from Synergy"

    The last option I added because you (rightly) state that Synergy sometimes gets the wrong arwork from Amazon. The deletion process should leave a note in the Album Covers folder so Synergy knows not to bother trying to download the artwork again the next time. Otherwise the wrong cover would re-appear the next time you play a song from that album. This happened to me when I manually removed eronous arwork.

  9. reppep

    As long as it's quick & easy to a) add existing covers without playing each song / album, and b) remove bad covers, I think I'll be happy. If you do write an external app, I'd love the option to have it scan my Library, finding all the covers it thinks are matches, and then later review and approve or reject them.

    Thanks!

  10. Greg Hurrell
    • ** Bug 143 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
  11. Dirk Schober

    I have another (maybe it's just me) situation, which would raise the hand for another application:

    Most music that I play is at work with my iPod connected to the computer. AFAIK, you cannot change the song files on the iPod from a 'foreign' machine, meaning my office Mac. Still, the cover art is collected by Synergie, which is great.

    In this case, automatic assignment would abviously not work right.

  12. Greg Hurrell
    • ** Bug 220 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
  13. clay

    I vote for option #5, but I would love there to be a separate stand alone application also. This would give you the opportunity to manage/organize your iTunes artwork. I don't think there's an application out there today that does that. I think a lot of people would buy Synergy for that feature alone! I know I would because I have over 5000 songs and probably have covers for about 100 of them.

    Suggestions for the application: - automated search for covers for all songs (or just selected songs) in iTunes - when it finds a cover for a song it will ask you to accept the cover or ask if you want to view other suggestions for cover, if you still weren't happy it would then ask you if you want to refine your search. If you were still unsuccessful at finding the right cover it would give you the option of skipping the song and then (as suggested in a different post) flag that song so that Synergy would not search for covers anymore for that song. - after your done with one song it will automatically go to the next one in the list - option to use a selected cover for all songs by a certain artist - drag and drop feature when a song is selected (like iTunes does now) - allow you to add your own (generic) graphic to represent all songs that you couldn't find a cover for

    That's all I can think of right now off the top of my head. I hope you can do this...please at least consider it. Thanks.

  14. Greg Hurrell

    If we're talking about a separate application dedicated to managing cover art, I just wanted to make a note here that this request also relates to request #6.

  15. John MaCabre

    I would also like to request option #5 in Synergy itself, with the possibility of an additional separate app that collects things for the entire library and then presents them for the users review.

    Also, since you're working on embedding things in the id3 tag, I think allowing for the option of being able to import the Album Release Year would be incredibly helpful (perhaps including an option to find the *Original* release date since Amazon usually displays the year for the reissue of an album).

  16. bugzilla user 246

    Option #3, as in selecting something that says "Automatically Apply Covert Art to Albums" (yes albums, not a song). So ft itunes is playing, Synergy does the following:

    if (Song Has No Cover) {

     getAlbumCover
 getTrackListFromAlbum
 for each song in album  {
   applyCover
 }

    }

    I dont care about getting a wrong jpg or not. I think Sofa is an application that does this very well (in terms of gettng the job done). As far as HOW it gets the job done, CPU intesive-wise, is the reason why I chose not to use it anymore.

    Make a quick fix and include it pronto, that is one feature I really can't live w/o.

    (In reply to comment #7)

    This is obviously a fairly popular feature request. What needs to be decided is *how* to implement >

    3. Embed art when an item in the Synergy Global Menu is selected. This is the easiest to implement in

    terms of not breaking the existing UI, and for my part it's the approach I favour most.

  17. neilio
    1. 5, definitely. I don't use the global menu item, and there's more than a good chance that users will have

    the floater active (it is one of the main reasons to use Synergy, after all).

    It would be nice to have a separate application that would bulk apply existing album art, though - I have just under 10,000 tracks in iTunes and doing this manually is, for obvious reasons, not that appealing. :)

  18. Michael Baudis

    well, i vote for any option to embed cover art globally, e.g. automatically while a track is played, or an option to play all tracks for some seconds (fixed or until th ecover is grabbed). i mostly use the ipod for playing music, so to have all covers would be very nice.

    michael.

  19. Greg Hurrell
    • ** Bug 330 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
  20. marcushe

    I would like the cover art that is downloaded with Synergy to be added to the iTunes library. I just got a new iPod and want to be able to see the covers on it. Thanks!

  21. Michael Nordmeyer

    Option 1 with a twist:

    Automatically add the artwork for the album, not only the song. Synergy always displays the once downloaded artwork regardless if it's correct or not. Therefor it should be embedded. Give an option to turn automatically embedding artwork off.

    If the song or album already has artwork embedded then don't embed.

    Remember the albums in which the artwork was embedded to not embed them again. Use information from artist, album and number of songs/CDs to identify the album later on. If the user later on deletes wrong or bad quality artwork you don't have to care about. If the user changes the artist/album information? Well, then you would automatically fetch the artwork again, because the remembered information won't match. But don't worry. With this new information you may be able to find the correct artwork and all is fine.

    Delete the artwork from the artwork folder after embedding.

    I don't like the idea of having the floater act as a mini application. It's just for displaying information. Also you can't judge from the small artwork displayed in the floater if the quality is OK or if you want to look for better ones.

  22. Christian Thomas

    Add my vote to a global option in Synergy to "Auto add album artwork to iTunes if none exists"

  23. Greg Hurrell
    • ** Bug 357 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
  24. Greg Hurrell
    • ** Bug 371 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
  25. Greg Hurrell

    Ok, this is now fixed in the current development build (to be released shortly as version 2.9). To be notified when it is released you can subscribe to the announcements mailing list.

    I ended up going with Option 3. More options may be added later, but for the time being I wanted to go with a conservative (non-automated) approach. If the feature proves to be reliable we can look at making it more automated (and therefore less conservative); the three main ideas are: (1) to make it automatic; (2) to make the transfers apply to all the tracks in an album at once instead of just single tracks; (3) a combination of the "1" and "2".

    I am going to add the "fixed-in-prerelease" keyword to this entry. Feature request #95 has already been filed with respect to the "entire albums at once" transfer. Have just opened feature request #430 to handle the tracking of the "automation" feature.

  26. Greg Hurrell

    Changing assignment to reflect my new email address.

    https://wincent.dev/a/news/archives/2006/05/change_of_email.php

  27. Greg Hurrell
    • ** Bug 360 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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