Howto: Music album covers in Thunar Nautilus and everywhere!

[foxy123]

It is an awesome app. Thanks a lot, great job.

I have a few questions though:

1. Is it possible add albums to a current play-list in mpd? Currently clicking on avatar replace the content of the play-list. What if I want to put a few albums into play-list in one go?

2. Is it possible to have a different name for avatars? I would like to have them in the format artist - year - album.

3. I wonder if it is possible to configure a custom view for a particular folder in Thunar. I like View as compact list for most of my folders, but I would prefer View as icon and zoomed for the Album folder.

[ayoli]

It is an awesome app. Thanks a lot, great job.

I have a few questions though:

1. Is it possible add albums to a current play-list in mpd? Currently clicking on avatar replace the content of the play-list. What if I want to put a few albums into play-list in one go?

2. Is it possible to have a different name for avatars? I would like to have them in the format artist - year - album.

I think avatar-factory uses the album folder name for avatars names, so you may want to rename your album folders artist-year-album and use the --name 2 option when generating avatars (this makes avata-factory not use the index number in the name).

3. I wonder if it is possible to configure a custom view for a particular folder in Thunar. I like View as compact list for most of my folders, but I would prefer View as icon and zoomed for the Album folder.

Nautilus can do that, i m not sure for thunar.

For the 1rst point, i do not have an answer.

[foxy123]

I think avatar-factory uses the album folder name for avatars names, so you may want to rename your album folders artist-year-album and use the --name 2 option when generating avatars (this makes avata-factory not use the index number in the name).

Nautilus can do that, i m not sure for thunar.

For the 1rst point, i do not have an answer.

Thanks a lot for the reply. For my first questions I have just commented out

mpc clear

in the script, I would rather clear my play-list manually now and then. Maybe it is possible to come up with a more elegant solution.

I wonder if the script can read info from tags? Then you could pick any name format for avatars.

I have asked about No.3 on the xfce mailing list.

[ayoli]

Thanks a lot for the reply. For my first questions I have just commented out

mpc clear

in the script, I would rather clear my play-list manually now and then. Maybe it is possible to come up with a more elegant solution.

I wonder if the script can read info from tags? Then you could pick any name format for avatars.

I have asked about No.3 on the xfce mailing list.

At the moment it cant read tags it only use find and sed i guess, but with use of a tool like id3tool for ex, this could be possible and maybe a good suggestion
edit: here's the outpout of id3tool on one of my mp3:

└─ $ -> id3tool downloads/music/x2c_-_Ragga_JungleTek_Mix2.mp3 
Filename: downloads/music/x2c_-_Ragga_JungleTek_Mix2.mp3
Song Title:     x2c -  Ragga JungleTek MIX2   
Artist:         smokering.co.uk               
Album:          djx2c.co.uk                   
Year:           2006

means your files should be well tagged. And now i m finally not sure that is possible to use since avatar-factory is made for albums. If the script use mp3 tags for avatar name you will have an avatar for each song instead of each album.

[SQuark]

A simple solution would be to use the (sub)directory structure in the naming scheme. E.g. I have subdirectories for every artist in my music directory, each of them having subdirectories for every album. The avatars would be called "Artist - Album" accordingly.
To have "Artist - Year - Album", you just have to use another level of subdirectories.

[foxy123]

At the moment it cant read tags it only use find and sed i guess, but with use of a tool like id3tool for ex, this could be possible and maybe a good suggestion
edit: here's the outpout of id3tool on one of my mp3:

└─ $ -> id3tool downloads/music/x2c_-_Ragga_JungleTek_Mix2.mp3 
Filename: downloads/music/x2c_-_Ragga_JungleTek_Mix2.mp3
Song Title:     x2c -  Ragga JungleTek MIX2   
Artist:         smokering.co.uk               
Album:          djx2c.co.uk                   
Year:           2006

means your files should be well tagged. And now i m finally not sure that is possible to use since avatar-factory is made for albums. If the script use mp3 tags for avatar name you will have an avatar for each song instead of each album.

well, you can still use it. Something like that:

~$ id3tool ~/Music/The\ Rolling\ Stones/1969\ -\ Let\ It\ Bleed/*.*|grep -E -m 3 "Artist|Year|Album"
Artist:         Rolling Stones                
Album:          Let It Bleed                  
Year:           1969

I have no idea how to code it though.

[lzfy]

I have to ask, can you make this work with Konqueror?

[Nonno Bassotto]

Just a couple of ideas for your application. I think the things you implemented work very well. I can think of two other avatars which would be nice to implement.

1) Avatars for your movies. This shouldn't be much more difficult than the imdb avatars, assuming one uses the proper title as a name for the file. The page to look for on imdb has an url like

http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%22arancia%20meccanica%22;s=tt;site=aka

This is an example for "Arancia meccanica", which is the italian name for "A clockwork orange". The last two parameters are used in order to look for alternative names too (in this case the italian one).

Once you have the page I think you can grab the cover art with the same code you used for the imdb avatars.

EDIT: D'oh. It seems that this sintax only works for alternative names, like the Jugoslavian "Beri Lindon" for "Barry Lindon". I couldn't find a sintax that always works and directly leads to the title main page.
EDIT: Even worst. There is a problem with articles. For example if you search "L'impero colpisce ancora" (italian title for "The empire strikes back") you are not lead to the main page, but to the search page. To get to the main page you should insert "impero colpisce ancora, L'" with the article at the end. Now I begin to understand why you didn't implement this yet...
I think there is no obvious workaround to parsing the search result page.

2) Anobii avatars. Anobii is an analogue of imdb, but for books. This is more difficult, since you usually have an account, where you register the books you have or you'd like to have. So it is not obvious how to extract information about the books you have. Anyway, one could use links too, like with imdb.

[aidanr]

@aidanr : Do you think you can continue to provide debs ?

yeah, sorry was away for the weekend, updated my other post

[aidanr]

I wonder if it is possible to configure a custom view for a particular folder in Thunar. I like View as compact list for most of my folders, but I would prefer View as icon and zoomed for the Album folder.

This is something I'd also like, right now I'm using rox-filler for avatar-factory and thunar for everything else. A profiles option or a command line option to use a different thunarrc would be cool, or perhaps a simple gtk window/app just for avatar factory.