Album Art Tagger 5.2 - Updated 26/10/2013

[trixmoto]

Thanks a lot!

[MagnusB]

I can't even get it to install.
I get a very informative "install error".

[Bex]

Try this:

Avoid "Product installation error"
- Vista Users:
- - To be able to install scripts you must Run MM as administrator.
- - It means that you must right click the MM icon and "Run as administrator" even if you are logged in as an administrator.
- All Users:
- - Check in your task manager that you only have one instance of MediaMonkey.exe running.

[dypsis]

I have read the info about this script on a number of occasions, but still cannot understand the purpose of it.

Does it extract the album art from a file? If so, then for what reason?

[trixmoto]

It does a number of different tasks including extracting artwork, embedding artwork and removing artwork. Some hardware and other software prefer to have the artwork outside of the track so it's useful for that. Also sometimes people decide that they want all the artwork either inside or outside the track for their own reasons and this script will help them do that easily.

[Mizery_Made]

It might have been discussed already (as I honestly haven't followed the development of this script for some time now) but I have seemed to have broken your "Keep Aspect Ratio" setting in the Extract & Resize fuction. I loaded a 600x450 image into one file of an album, then tried to use your script to extract a small version to the folder as Folder.jpg as I normally do. With it set to extract a 200x200 version of the file, but keep Aspect Ratio, I ended up with a 200x200 file.

What it looks to have done was, shrink the file to fit the 200 width, then filled in the rest of the missing height at the bottom with black.

[trixmoto]

This is not broken, this is how MM deals with aspect ratio (I'm not doing this, MM is!).

[Mizery_Made]

I wasn't aware that it was The Monkey that did this, figuring it was something you were doing. Well if this isn't your fault, then Bad Monkey!

[trixmoto]

Well, technically I asked the monkey to do it, so I guess it's partially my fault. The problem is, if you're keeping the aspect ratio then should the width or the height be ignored?

[Mizery_Made]

It really should work in all situations. If you use a 400x300 picture as an example, then set the output to 200x200 but have the Keep Aspect Ratio option checked, then I would expect it to shrink the width to 200 since it's the larger of the two measurements, then adjust the height to keep the Aspect Ratio, thus resulting in a 200x150 image. It should also work in reverse too, if the image is instead taller then it is wide (300x400) then it should shrink the height to fit the limit and then adjust the width, thus resulting in a 150x200 image. I found it odd that the space left due to the uneven aspect ratio was simply filled. *Shrugs*

[trixmoto]

Well that's the only way to keep the aspect ratio whilst creating the defined image size! I will add an option to not keep the size fixed though, just to make you happy!

[Kilmatead]

Apologies if any of these have already been addressed, but my eyes rebelled after reading through the previous 23 pages, and tearing them out would have been messy and painful...

1. It'd be nice to have the <genre> mask implemented, for those of us who auto-organise under such a scheme. (And on the same subject, only lowercase <xxx> letters are recognised, wherein in MM proper, you can specify <Album> instead of forcing <album>. Just a thought for continuity.)

2. Supress is spelled 'Suppress'. (I only mention as it shows up in multiple menus, and looks odd.)

3. Might it be possible to have a specialized version of the Extract part of the script which would extract a selected image (perhaps to a temporary folder) then invoke an editor (such as Gimp) to open said image for editing - and then re-embed the edited image where it came from? I tried doing this myself by modifying the .vbs file but decided suicide was easier (and painless). The reason I ask is that often images from Amazon (and others) are often "flawed" and in serious need of cropping and/or colour focus before being truly usable. I use a small script for invoking an Audio-editor for the same purpose (remember kids, don't Transcode at home), used whenever the original audio is flawed... and I primarily only need to extract images to edit them (it's easier having everything embedded). In fact, as most of the sound-editors I'm aware of have emotional problems dealing with Album Art (they tend to just strip it out), having this subset of your whole script could be used for preserving AA when invoking the Audio Editor as well, but (obviously) I'm not requesting that part. Just a thought.

[trixmoto]

1) Genre is a bit tricky as this is not album based, as the other fields are. I'll look at adding it though. Adding "<Artist>" as well as "<artist>" is possible but would make it slower (as it should have to check both) and I can't see any benefit.

2) Ooops!

3) I'm not sure how this would work exactly. You want each time the script exports an image to pause, open up an image editor and then wait for the editor to be closed, then at this point embed the image back into the track?

[Kilmatead]

1) <Artist> vs. <artist> ...and I can't see any benefit.

The only benefit would be continuity with the way masks can be entered in MM proper, i.e., mixed-case. Isn't there a function in the vbs library already to "strip out" case? Just run that on the original string, and whatever the user enters will look the same in the end. <ArTiSt>, et al, becomes <artist> so it can process as normal. No need to check twice.

3) I'm not sure how this would work exactly. You want each time the script exports an image to pause, open up an image editor and then wait for the editor to be closed, then at this point embed the image back into the track?

Pretty much, yes. The only reason I ever need to extract AA is to edit the .jpg (as I said, for cropping or colour correction or to just modify it for fun). To do this now requires 1) extraction, then 2) editing, then 3) deleting old embedded image, then 4) re-embedding new image, and finally 5) deleting the leftover "temporary" file. (A script would be ideally suited to simplify the process.)

Obviously this could only be used on a per-album basis, but as your script is already intelligent enough to not copy out duplicate images, one could highlight the album, export the single image, call up 'WShell.Run "C:\Program Files\Gimp-2.0\bin\gimp-2.4.exe " & Chr(34) & itm.Path & Chr(34), 1, 0' - re-embed the edited image (into original files, obviously), and delete the .jpg.

As far as I can tell, the shell call will wait until Gimp is terminated to resume, so it's not a big deal. The choice of editor obviously makes the script highly specialized, so it would be awkward to implement in the script-as-it-is-now, but as all the necessary functions are already written, this can't be a completely silly idea.

Like I said, I tried modifying your .vbs file myself to do this, but as it mostly involved "taking out what was unnecessary" - and your functions seem designed around dealing with multiple-files/multiple-choices, it became very messy for me to figure out what wasn't needed, so I rather made a hash of it . I reckon with your own familiarity to your own code, this would be vastly simpler for you to contemplate, hence the request.

[Sherv]

Hey there trixmoto, excellent script! I'm using it to first clear out the links/artwork embedded in my mp3s and then re-establish proper links to the album artwork. For some reason a number of my files have blank (white) pictures for album art, which is mystifying, so I thought I could use your script to fix this. I begin by using option 3 to remove the artwork but after 8 to 20 files in the process it crashes with the following:

"Access violation at address 0082F4E1 in module 'Media Monkey.exe.' Read of address 00000008." It then asks for me to file an error report, after which it then gives me the following error:

"Error #-2147418113 -
File: "C:\Program Files\MediaMonkey\Scripts\AlbumArtTagger.vbs", Line: 982, Column: 8"

"Error happened during script execution:
Catastrophic failure"

Any ideas as to what may be causing this? I've tried selecting as few as 10 files to as many as my entire collection (12000+) and it keeps crashing. I must say I am a bit proud to be responsible for a catastrophic failure

Thanks man

-Sherv