[slinkelist] Cover Art

Mon, 01 Nov 1999 22:46:33 PST

Chris,

Thanks, Chris!  However, the question was about using Amazon versus CDNow -- 
not if or how to program it. :>

I have a program that does just what you said -- except it's not quite that 
simple with album covers due to the huge volume of mismatched names between 
the cddb database and the music sites with covers, like cdnow.  There are 
dozens of permutations I go through to try to confirm/establish a hit before 
giving up or requiring manual intervention.  Even so, I'm only hitting 
roughly 50-60% of most album lists I've tried (from my own and others).  
There are many albums without covers at all, and many albums not in the 
database.  Then there are all the ones with incorrect/inconsistent names.

I like the search engine on the web site you suggested a lot more than 
others I've seen, though.  Except it seems a little slow.  Thanks for the 
suggestions.

Ken

----Original Message Follows----
From: Chris Haddan <chris@haddan.com>
To: 'Ken Geoffrion' <kgeoffrion@hotmail.com>, 
m@wroth.com,slinkelist@nirvis.com
Subject: RE: [slinkelist] Cover Art
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 21:00:15 -0800

It's not that hard, I did it for DVD covers using us.imdb.com.

I haven't done it for CD covers yet, but using album and artist name,
you can pretty easily do a search query to a web site such as
www.muze.com, parse the search result html for the first item found,
load that page, parse for the IMG src line of the cover picture, then
download the picture via http.  It could take hours to run for a large
list, and there are sure to be some false matches, but you can get the
bulk of the covers without too much effort... well other than a couple
of hours of programming.

example:

walk your database record by record, using the artist and album title,
build a URL with the format below:

http://www.muze.com/pop/pop_search_results.asp?artist=def+leppard&album=
hysteria&song=&GENRE=ALL&x=0&y=0

load the page, and parse for first occurrence of text "album -
%albumname", grab the <a href=....>, which is
http://www.muze.com/pop/pop_album.asp?MUZENBR=++96110 load that page,
parse the html for the "http://www.muze.com/albums/", grabbing the
entire path: http://www.muze.com/albums/090/96110.jpg,
then just download the picture, renaming to "def leppard, hysteria.jpg",
then insert a image reference into your database.

Checkout these API's in the Microsoft internet sdk for easy loading of
web pages via your app:
	InternetOpen
	InternetConnect
	HttpOpenRequest
	HttpSendRequest
	HttpQueryInfo
	InternetQueryDataAvailable
	InternetReadFile
	InternetCloseHandle

then just import the msado15.dll template library, and you've got easy
database access.  roll it all together and a few hundred lines of code
later, your set. ;-)

-Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Geoffrion [mailto:kgeoffrion@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, November 01, 1999 4:45 PM
To: m@wroth.com; slinkelist@nirvis.com
Subject: Re: [slinkelist] Cover Art

I've looked at it and decided not to persue it.  Most of the covers I've 
looked at are GIFs instead of JPGs, about 1.5 times bigger, and smaller in 
dimensions.  They do look nice, though.

----Original Message Follows----
From: michael mcdermott <m@wroth.com>
To: Slinke-List <slinkelist@nirvis.com>
Subject: Re: [slinkelist] Cover Art
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 19:08:30 -0500

Tom Hammond-Doel wrote:
  >
  > The deal is that my 600 covers, at a boring 1 and a half minutes per
cover
  > is 15 hours of utterly boring wasted time.  The only bad side-effect
of
  > getting covers automatically is that the resolution that I've seen is
  > pretty lousy - which is why I'm still scanning my own covers into the
  > database between zzzzzzzz's (one beer, one scan, one beer, one
scan....).
  >
  > Rein wrote:
  >
  > > What is all this trouble over cover art. Scanners are a dime a
dozen
  > > these days so just scan the covers. No need for any fancy programs
that
  > > don't work half the time.
  > >
  > > Marc Parker wrote:
  > >
  > > > Can anyone suggest additional sources beyond CDNOW for cover art?
  > > >
  > > > Parker
  > > >

Has anyone tried to write a program that grabs cover art from amazon.com
yet?
The resolution is much better even if their naming convention is really
obtuse.

--
Is that you John Wayne? Is this me?

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