New version 2.1 (08 august/10)

This application can extract the album art embedded in music files, and create the necessary files to display album art correctly in RockBox.

If you have an iPod, you can take a look at iPod Album Art Extracter for RockBox.

RockBox supports Album Art but with some limitations like described in his wiki page AlbumArt.
Between the limitations are that does not support Embedded album art, only external image files in BMP or JPG format.

This application is addressed to make easy the visualization of album art in Rockbox. It scan music files and extract, convert and save album art in a external file, just what Rockbox needs.

The following characters will be replaced with an underscore (_) in the filename of the AlbumArt file generated, : \ / : < > ? * |. Double quotes will be replaced by singlequotes.

Now you can see album art displayed in RockBox, and use PictureFlow to visualize albums.

Download:


- In Windows it needs .NET framework 2.0+ to run (can be downloaded from here: .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 (x86)).
- In Linux it needs Mono Runtime 2.0+ to run (can be downloaded from here: Mono 2.0)

This app uses TagLib#.

Changelog:


2.1 - 08 august 2010

  • Update TagLib# version to 2.0.3.7
  • When the location is .rockbox/albumart foder, it looks first for albumartist tag and if it doesn't exist, then uses artist tag.
2.0 - 26 august 2009

  • Update TagLib# version to 2.0.3.2.
  • Include support for JPG output format, as well as BMP.
  • Support for ALL locations and conventions which Rockbox looks for Album Art.
  • New layout.
  • Added option for overwrite Album Art file if already exists.
  • Doesn't need to generate temp files anymore, it saves directly the final Album Art in the location desired.
  • Enhanced example of filename output.
  • Include support for .m4a files.
  • Now doesn't create .rockbox/albumart directory without asking, instead you must choose it.
1.2.1 - 07 february 2009

  • Bug fix: Doesn't recognize file extensions in upper case.
1.2 - 06 november 2008

  • Now it works in Linux with Mono Runtime libraries!!
1.1 - 25 october 2008

  • Added a detailed log of errors found while processing files.
  • Added an option to include [artist] in filename.
  • Minor changes to layout and UI.
1.0 - 26 september 2008

  • Initial release.

33 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent, thanks for the quick update! Will check it out!

Anonymous said...

Just tried this with my Sansa e260 Rockbox latest build. Had a problem because somehow the cover name is not recognized. It may be that the ARTIST name or the COVER NAME has spaces in the name. Will keep checking.

Victor Cardenas said...

Hi offroad... your problem is with the Album Art Extracter? or with Rockbox reconizing the album art files?
Spaces in the name is not a problem, check the location where you are saving the album art files, must be compliant with this
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/AlbumArt#Where_To_Put_The_Images

Anonymous said...

If a file it's *.MP3 and not *.mp3, then your app doesn't recognize it, anyway, great work!!

Smee said...

I had the same issues. All my media have the extension as MP#, but Album Art Extractor only scans for extensions of mp3 in lower case so I am unable to pull album art.

Smee

Smee said...

Sorry, I meant MP3, not MP#

Smee

Victor Cardenas said...

Thanks Smee, the new version fix that, and now it doesn't matter if the extension is upper case or lower case.

Anonymous said...

Great!! Thank you very much.

Anonymous said...

Tried the Windows version and it works splendidly but I'd really prefer the Linux version. However, it isn't bundled in the download as is implied.

Victor Cardenas said...

Anonymous: the linux version is the same file as the windows version... you must have Mono in your linux environment and run this in command line:
# mono AlbumArtExtracter.exe

in the post is the link to download Mono.

Jay said...

Hey, great little app, thanks so much for writing it!

A couple issues I've found, though. First, it tends to auto-create /albumart/ directories without being prompted. It should probably wait to create those until you actually tell it to extract.

Also, like a couple other posters, it seems to refuse to extract some of my albums' art. I think it has to do with either the albums having a lot of spaces in their name, or either the band or album name being extremely long. (for example: "Jesus H Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse" does not get its art ripped)

And, one suggestion: An option to have it rip to folder.bmp within whatever directory it's pointed at would be nice.

Thanks!

Victor Cardenas said...

Jay: Thanks for your suggestions... i will consider all that for the next version.
The problem of not extracting some album art is due to TagLib# library that i used. I'm currently testing another libraries to read album art, to minimize that problems.

Anonymous said...

I get the following error running your program in linux:

mono AlbumArtExtracter.exe

** (AlbumArtExtracter.exe:13804): WARNING **: The following assembly referenced from /home/wolf/AlbumArtExtracter.exe could not be loaded:
Assembly: System.Windows.Forms (assemblyref_index=2)
Version: 2.0.0.0
Public Key: b77a5c561934e089
The assembly was not found in the Global Assembly Cache, a path listed in the MONO_PATH environment variable, or in the location of the executing assembly (/home/wolf/).


** (AlbumArtExtracter.exe:13804): WARNING **: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' or one of its dependencies.

** (AlbumArtExtracter.exe:13804): WARNING **: Missing method EnableVisualStyles in assembly /home/wolf/AlbumArtExtracter.exe, type System.Windows.Forms.Application

Unhandled Exception: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' or one of its dependencies.
File name: 'System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'


I suspect its a dependency issue.

evilevilwayz@aol.com

Victor Cardenas said...

What version of Mono do you have?
It needs version 2.0

Anonymous said...

It would be nice if you had a switch so that the files were put back into original folder. The way it is now you can't use the recursive to do that. This way I could click on my music folder on my sansa and just start it and all would be in the right place. Now I have to do all one at a time.

Anonymous said...

I have a stupid question. What File Format is the program looking for? I've ran this a couple times and it cannot find any artwork, even tho ALL JPG files are created by ITunes & Win. Media Player. I can manually create the BMPs, but this prog. can't convert JPGs I suppose.
Thanks.

Victor Cardenas said...

The program look for these formats:
aac, mp3, wma, wmv, asf, ogg, mpeg, mpg, flac, mpc, mp+, mpp, wav, wv, and yes, it can convert jpg artwork.

What does it say in the log?.. there you can see if the problem is finding the files, or extracting album art, or converting to bmp.


And about putting files into original folder, i will work in that, in fact, will make support all the variants of locations and names supported for rockbox.

Ark74 said...

Hi!

Great app, it is very useful.
Does this software has License?

It would be great to be RockBox compatible in order to be able for inclusion in future releases.

Best regards and thanks!! :)

Anonymous said...

wondering if you could add support for m4a files? I see you've got it working on your ipod extractor. Now that itunes has opened up the store for unprotected content i get some songs there and they are currently unread. thanks so much for the great program.

bob said...

Is there a support forum? I have a 5g 80g that always hangs after having found 5345 files.

Victor Cardenas said...

Hi Robert... there is not support forum, but can help you here.
If always hangs in that number file, maybe you could identify which one is the problematic file, then remove (temporaly) to be sure the problem is caused by that specific file.

If you can't find which one is, then i can add an option to generate a debug trace to find it.

After identifying the file, we can analyze it to figure out why is hanging the app.

Regards.

Anonymous said...

Doesn't seem to work in Ubuntu 9.04 with Mono 2.0.1

Unhandled Exception: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' or one of its dependencies.
File name: 'System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'

I love rockbox said...

Works Great! 6 out of 5 stars!

Jim Manning Jr. said...

Dude This Works Great ...I just HAD to let you know!!!!!
Da Jazz Cat From Philly

Victor Cardenas said...

thank you very much!

Anonymous said...

Hi Victor,

I wonder why your app doesn't scan the ID3v2 TPE2 frame content (used to store album artist information)

Victor Cardenas said...

well as you might know, I use TagLib# to access metadata, and for the artist information I use Tag.FirstPerformer, which is the same as Tag.FirstArtist (currently deprecated).
There is an option to read Tag.FirstAlbumArtist that I don't use, but can do it if that is your requeriment.

regards.

Anonymous said...

Your utility is just what I needed. I did notice however that file names created by your utility for the rockbox albumart folder do not work if the music file has tags for both "artist" and "album artist" (this is usually the case with songs from compilation albums such as movie soundtracks). Rockbox uses the value of the "album artist" tag (if it contains a value) to generate the filename of the image it will search for in the albumart folder. If you could add an option in your utility to prefer the value of "Album Artist" tag over that of the "Artist" tag, then it would work better with Rockbox. Thanks!

Victor Cardenas said...

Thank you for that information.. I didn't know that, I will fix it ASAP. If the files generated for rockbox albumart folder always gives priority to "album artist" tag in filename, then i think is better to always look first for "album artist" tag when that location is selected for image files... instead of adding an extra option don't you think?
Maybe you could help me testing the app with your files before releasing the version with the fix. If you agree, please send me a mail. Best regards.

Anonymous said...

As Rockbox is able to automagically resize album art, could you add an option to not resize album art to a specific size but keep the original size from album art extracted from music files ?

Thanks a lot,

Bertrand

Victor Cardenas said...

@Bertrand:
Already did it with iPod Album Art Extracter. Soon this one will have it too.
Thanks for your suggestions.

Anonymous said...

Is there a way to make it not mess with the aspect ratio? Is there a way to make it not change the image dimensions at all?

Ryder Jack said...

Nice blog and good content. Thanks for sharing such great information. hope you keep sharing such kind of information Files Phone Number Extractor