Getting Good At Album Art
I recently realized that my digital music collection was in a sorry state. Scattered here, there, and wherever. Album art was scattered even worse. Some research helped me better understand MP3 tags, and what goes in and what stays out.
My scattered collection became obvious as I recovered from a strange bug between an iPod formatted for a Mac, and iTunes running on a PC that caused iTunes on a PC to scramble the catalog data. It still hurts, so I’ll be keeping Apple’s “helpful” management at arm’s length.
I have resolved to make my music as future proof as possible. It’s all in a single Library folder with hundreds of subfolders, named for the artists or the movie title for the soundtracks. The Library folder is completely away from iTunes, and I don’t use that silly, silly “Compilations” folder. The music is all in MP3 format.
I’ve read lots of remarks about the reduced quality of MP3 versus the many, many other uncompressed formats (“My format’s better than your format.”), but I have yet to detect any difference between an MP3 and an uncompressed version. I guess I remember too well the sound quality of cassettes. MP3 songs are great! On the plus side, using MP3s allows me to embed the album art. I like the album art because I don’t like the generic music note that Apple uses.
Don’t let iTunes “Find Album Art.” I gave it a one-time try, but its choices were remarkably silly for about a third of the songs. I guess I’m not mainstream enough in my music choices.
I have owned hundreds of vinyl albums since the early 1970s. I kept a few after the big sell off about eight years ago, and I have now digitized them, along with several audio books on cassettes. All of the digitized albums and cassettes are kept as uncompressed WAV files, along with matching album art that I either photographed with a digital camera and a copy stand, with full bright sunlight as the light source, or scanned using Photoshop. These albums have never been offered on CD, and include the one-man Broadway shows of Hal Holbrook’s “Mark Twain Tonight”, and James Whitmore’s “Give ‘em Hell Harry”, along with Mancini’s soundtrack for “The Hawaiians”, Roger Miller’s “Waterhole No. 3″ ballad and soundtrack, and the soundtrack from “Vanishing Point”. The rare stuff also includes the 1972 Warner Brothers 50th Anniversary, three-disk set of movie dialogue, along with several old radio programs on cassette. [October 2009 Update: Less than a year ago, Vanishing Point both as a CD of the soundtrack and a DVD of the movie became available on Amazon.]
I still use iTunes because the user interface is the best I’ve tried (and I have tried several since the Crash of Late May). With everything as an MP3 file, iTunes’ sticky fingers are kept at bay. It does a real nice job at embedding the song information, and the player is very easy to use. Just don’t let iTunes manage your music collection.
iTunes completely lost all of my trust when I connected my Mac-formatted iPod to the new Dell PC for the first time. Instead of asking to reformat the iPod, which is what I expected, some kind of glitch made iTunes scramble the iTunes music catalog data. I ended up with over 3900 songs with truncated titles and no other information. Since I had already moved all the music to the new Library folder, and arranged the subfolder names by artist and album (or by movie name for the soundtracks), the only saving grace was that the location was still shown on the iTunes’ Summary tab. So if anyone wonders what I’ve been doing throughout June and July, there you go. Three words: music collection recovery.
The basics: as of today there are over 600 albums and over 8000 songs, and it takes over 38GB of hard drive space. The music is all MP3s, including the 44 DRM-protected songs purchased from the iTunes store that I have since converted to MP3s. Some are in Apple’s AAC format, but they are slowly being converted to MP3s.
I use a combination of dbPoweramp and MediaMonkey and TagTuner to edit the MP3 tags. dbPoweramp is great at viewing all the tags, allowing me to simply delete the iTunes proprietary tags. MediaMonkey is great at showing me what album art is already embedded, including those crappy little 75×75 and 200×200 thingys that Windows Media Player stuffs in the MP3s. Today I only use Windows Media Player as a single-song player when I double-click an MP3. I don’t like the way it “manages” my music.
The album art is being kept in a separate “Album Covers” folder in the Pictures system folder. The original images are archived as TIF files in a separate subfolder. The album art is in the form of 500×500 JPGs embedded in the MP3s. For songs with embedded images smaller than 500×500, I use MediaMonkey to grab the image and save it to the separate album art folder. I then open it in Photoshop, save it as an uncompressed TIF and adjust the canvas size to be square. I’m getting good at using Photoshop to fill in the backgrounds of the now-square image, and using layers, background colors, the clone brush, and the healing brush.
After making the image square, I adjust the resolution to be at least 96 pixels/inch (I scan my own at 300 pixels/inch), then let Photoshop up-sample it to 500×500, then do a single unsharp mask filter. It then gets saved as a JPG, and that’s what then gets embedded. For missing album art, I’m having pretty good luck at finding album art on the web, and adjusting the image to match my criteria.
Because so many have shared their own album art images on the world wide web, allowing me to use them for my collection, I want to give back, and share my album art.
To give back to one of my sources, I have already shared several on Amazon.
