High Resolution Album Art Page Updated

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.jasondunn.com/albumart/index.html' target='_blank'>http://www.jasondunn.com/albumart/index.html</a><br /><br /></div>I've had <a href="http://www.jasondunn.com/albumart/index.html">this page</a> linked on up my blog for quite a while, but I've never actually posted about it. After updating it with 50+ new album covers that I scanned (there are now over 800 album covers), I figured it was time to give it some publicity. Here's the write-up about it for those that haven't <a href="http://www.jasondunn.com/albumart/index.html">visited the page</a> before, and a warning: only do so if you have a fast Internet connection, the page is NOT bandwidth friendly at all (it's 13 MB in size with all the thumbnails):<br /><br /><img src="http://www.jasondunn.com/albumart/thumbnails/avril_lavigne_the_best_damn_thing_2007.jpg" /> <img src="http://www.jasondunn.com/albumart/thumbnails/daughtry_daughtry_2006.jpg" /> <br /><br /><br />"Below you'll find all of of CD covers from our music collection, including a few generic photos used for singles or indy artists that have no CDs for sale. Why did I want to do this? I really enjoy seeing the album art for my CDs, but I found the 200 x 200 pixel low-resolution, overly compressed junk that Windows Media Player included by default to be completely inadequate (ditto for the equally lame Zune software). I also found the Microsoft method of placing the album art in the music folder to be very short-sighted. When I moved songs to another computer, the songs themselves had no album art. And because <a href="http://www.foldershare.com/">FolderShare</a> (a Windows Live service) makes all hidden files un-hidden when it syncs folders, I ended up with thousands of JPEG images scattered through my music folders. Since I often access my music via Windows Explorer rather than the ultra-slow library of Windows Media Player 10 (11 is much better at this), when I'd drag and drop the folder of music the now un-hidden JPEGs would come along for the ride and show up in my playlist and stop the music as they'd display. It was a complete mess. Embedding the JPG album art inside the audio file itself is a much more elegant solution, and it's one that Microsoft should have implemented by now.<br /><br />This time consuming project took nearly four months of work, and I couldn't have completed it without the help of my wonderful wife Ashley (who did the bulk of the scanning). After scanning them at 300 dpi, we cropped and adjusted each of the album covers one by one. This process helped re-introduce me to my CD collection, reminding me of albums so bad I wonder why I purchased them, to albums that are so good I wonder why I stopped listening to them. This project was like looking at my own personal history with music (though I'd have to go back to the remnants of my cassette collection to get true scope).<br /><br />Because neither Windows Media Player 10 nor 11 will shrink album art to fit the preview window, using the 1500 x 1500 (or thereabouts) pixel original file is impractical. It also causes some media players problems because the header of the file (where the JPEG is stored) becomes too large to process, and the audio file will not play. Thus, these 640 x 640 (or so) versions were exported using <a href="http://www.picasa.com/">Picasa</a>. These covers are the copyright of the respective artists and should only be used in conjunction with music that you legally own. The easiest way to embed the art inside the song itself is to use a tool such as <a href="http://www.mediamonkey.com/">MediaMonkey</a>. I hope you enjoy using these album covers.<br /><br />I'll probably update the page a couple times a year when I've bought at least 20 new CDs, so feel free to check back now and then.

[ctmagnus]

I've used your work a few times in the past. Thank you! :D

As for covers that you do not have listed yet, Amazon generally works well for that.

[BabyJ2590]

Jason,

Thank you for sharing. I also scan album art (back and inlays too because iTunes shows these as well) for albums that I can't find artwork for online. I am curious how difficult the album art page of your site was to build. It looks really great. I was thinking of doing something similar to have a visual for myself and to share with others, seeing as I already have all the hi-res album art.

Thanks
Jordan

[Jason Dunn]

As for covers that you do not have listed yet, Amazon generally works well for that.

Yes, Amazon has more and more album art in nice 600 x 600 JPG format, lightly compressed, so that's a great source for many CD covers.

[Jason Dunn]

I am curious how difficult the album art page of your site was to build. It looks really great.

It's very, very simple: I just used Picasa (http://www.picasa.com). It's free, and it has an option for exporting an album as a Web page. :D

[BabyJ2590]

Thanks Jason. I feel stupid because I use and love Picasa to organize my digital photos, but I guess I never came across that feature.

[Jason Dunn]

...but I guess I never came across that feature.

Don't feel bad - they don't make it very obvious that the feature is there, and it hasn't changed at all since version 1.0...I think they expect most people to use the album upload feature now.

[Tom W.M.]

Thanks a lot for this. As I don't own a scanner I'm at the mercy of the Internet for album art. Your site is a great resource. One suggestion: put the artist and album underneath each cover image so that I can search the page for the cover textually.

BabyJ2590, if you use Amazon to search for album art I recommend checking out the Greasemonkey (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748) Firefox add-on along with my Amazon Large Images (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7613) script. It makes product images (and user-contributed images) as large as possible on the product page itself, removing the need to open a pop-up for a larger image. It's pretty handy, if I do say so myself. :)

[kiwi]

The "VengaBoys" and "Aqua" ? - heh 8)

I havent heard them in ages.. ( I have those 2 Albums as well.) Nice collection. Need some more Metallica, Ill Nino and Disturbed though :wink:

B.

[Jason Dunn]

One suggestion: put the artist and album underneath each cover image so that I can search the page for the cover textually.

I'd LOVE to do that - in fact, I'd love to optimize that page to make it more search-engine friendly, but it's a completely automated build process - it's a straight dump from Picasa using the "Web Page Export" tool. There's no way I'd ever want to update that page manually...so I'm at the mercy of Picasa or whatever tool I use to export the images.

[Jason Dunn]

The "VengaBoys" and "Aqua" ? - heh 8)

I'm afraid that's my wife's contribution to my music collection. Although you can blame the Ace of Bass on me. ;-)

[Tom W.M.]

One suggestion: put the artist and album underneath each cover image so that I can search the page for the cover textually.
I'd LOVE to do that - in fact, I'd love to optimize that page to make it more search-engine friendly, but it's a completely automated build process - it's a straight dump from Picasa using the "Web Page Export" tool. There's no way I'd ever want to update that page manually...so I'm at the mercy of Picasa or whatever tool I use to export the images.
Well, here's (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/11659) a quick Greasemonkey script that puts the each thumbnail's filename underneath it. With this script you can use the browser's find feature to search the page.