Music albulm cover art

[Chazotta]

This is a very basic question, sorry, but how do you collate and organise the music albulm cover art with the relevant albums and make it display in Xlobby? Is there some association that you have to make between the albulm and the picture in Winamp or do you do it Xlobby?

Is there any documentation regarding Xlobby for people like me who have no clue about some of the basics and how to get the simple things working?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

regards
Mark

[Twit]

The album art needs to be in the folder with the mp3's.

If your music looks some thing like.

C:\Music\Bon Jovi\ Crossroads\somesong.mp3

Then you cover art needs to be in with the mp3's. It can be any name you want. Mine are all jpg's.

[Chazotta]

I am using APE files - does this matter?

I have tested this using a BMP file but nothing seemed to work - does this matter?

For instance, I downloaded the cover for Brothers In Arms as a bitmap file then placed in into this directory -

c:\Music\Dire Straits\Brothers In Arms - 1985\

along with the nine APE (Monkey) files. The files play fine through Xlobby but I can't see the albulm cover?

I'm only using the default skin at the moment, until I get my head around how to use this program.

thanks again

Mark

[Twit]

OK, just tried a bmp and it works fine.

If you press F2 (setup) then the database tab then click the music database then edit. Then click on an album and on the right hand side you should see the path to your album art. Is the path there and correct.

I have read that you may need to shutdown xlooby and restart it to see the covers. I have never needed to do this.

[Chazotta]

Twit

Thanks for your fast replies on this. This is a great forum.

Okay - I have got it working!

Next question though - Do I have to manually set this path for EVERY albulm or is there a global setting or is the program inteilligent enough to work it out for other albulms?

I have about 100 albulms ripped to APE but have no cover art at the moment.

Also, what does the offline check do and what is a "spider" (both these things are in the music DB edit section)?

BTW I had to restart Xlobby for the cover art to kick in!

Mark

[zewt]

You could have done a DB refresh and it should pick up the new album art.

F2->Database

Click "Music" from the selection window

Click the "Refresh" button. (lower right side of window)

The Music directories will be re-scanned for "new content".

----

"SPIDER"

Spiders are generally programs that search the internet and web pages. Crawling through all pages it can find in a web site, grabbing meta tags and reading text, files and graphics. Search engines use them to gather content.

In this application a "spider" searches specific web sites such as amazon.com for matches to your music and/or movies. Upon finding matches it retrieves a "listing" of potential graphics for use as "coverart".

This is possible since web pages are basically a big text file called HTML. It's similar to searching a word document for specific words and phrases.

---

Album coverart.

If you have ripped your music with one of the standard tools, the files should be organized in a manner that Xlobby can understand and "intelligently" find appropriate coverart for.

The normal format is
ARTIST NAME ---> ALBUM NAME ---> Music Files(MP3, WAV, etc.)

IE.

X:\Music\Basia\The Sweetest Illusion\Drunk on love.mp3
X:\Music\Basia\The Sweetest Illusion\Yearning.mp3
X:\Music\Basia\The Sweetest Illusion\An Olive Tree.mp3

X: can be C:, or D: or whatever you have entered into you music directories. Even a mapping to another computer.

So to match my example above exactly:

DRIVE LETTER:\misc.DIRECTORYNAME\ARTIST NAME\ALBUM NAME\"Music Files"(MP3, WAV, etc.)

[antipasto]

The Godfather is a great freeware program for tagging all your mp3s... There are many many programs that do this... some really really suck with spyware though, so be careful.