Artwork advice required.

[charmingnathan]

I am starting out on a new Community Radio service which is going to feature unknown artists and bands quite a lot, and to this end, I want to get the system correct to start with, including the software.

I am given to understand that most radio station website's that display artwork for songs use the iTunes database? Obviously, with the comparatively unknown nature of some of these performers, they probably won't be listed on this database yet.

I believe that the most common method of storing artwork is within the .mp3 file, but this is also the most inflexible, and that a better way of doing so, is to store these artworks in a separate folder, then instruct the software to look to this folder first, before any external databases?

Can you advise if this is correct please, and how these artworks should be stored in and work with Media Monkey, if at all?

The website will be using WordPress, the player on the site will be A.I.O. Radio Player, and I would also be submitting the service to other websites that list Internet & Community Radio services, for example, https://www.radio-uk.co.uk

I have also been advised by a former manager of an Internet Radio station that he thinks taking a lot of trouble over artworks is a waste of time, "as people don't tend to look at the device they are listening to your output on, plus most of them have screensavers which come on after a while, anyway".

Your thoughts please?

Thanks for your help.

[Lowlander]

I always recommend to embed Artwork within the audio file. This way no matter how you organize your files nor how much you move them around the Artwork is always discovered by any application able to read embedded Artwork. The drawback is the size requirement as the Artwork is stored in each file instead of once per Album, but hard drive space is cheap enough that this isn't a concern anymore for most.

The question you need to answer though is if your method to publish to the website/radio stream supports this.

If not, then you'd probably have to use external Artwork. For this make sure that you store files from an Album in a separate folder and that the Artwork files are also stored in this folder with the Album files. This should allow MediaMonkey to associate the Artwork on scanning if you have the option to scan file directories for Artwork enabled under Tools > Options > Library.

[charmingnathan]

Thanks for your reply Lowlander.

Would Media Monkey be able to help me with that process?

The A.I.O. Player software the website uses is here: http://doc.prahec.com/aio-radio

Having read some of the documentation with this, it appears that I have to extract the image files into their own separate folder, per each track. Obviously, when dealing with a lot of files, this would create a look of work, so is there anyway this can be done at least partially automatically, per track, with the correct format of ARTIST-TITLE please?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers.

[Lowlander]

This Addon can extract embedded Artwork to external files: https://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewt ... art+tagger

[dtsig]

your best bet is to place all questions for the addon in the addon section of AddOns

https://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewt ... f=2&t=8678

[Peke]

Hi,
it depends on how you serve tracks to your server/gateway eg. do MM play them or you upload them to server and play them from there?

It should be fairly easy to extract Album art data from files if served directly and is uploaded them MM can be set to sync to specific folder and extract/save album art along files.

[charmingnathan]

Hello Peke,

Thanks for your reply.

To answer your question, as the original I posted seems to have been deleted, the artwork would simply be removed from the .mp3's in their files in one directory, and copied to another folder in the same directory.

However, even if I do get the Media Monkey add-on working properly, presumably I would still have to manually enter their directory into the Radio Player on the website, in order for the software to be able to locate the artworks?

As this would mean several hundred thousand tracks, I think this would still make the exercise un-workable, unless I fan find an alternative?!

Cheers.

[Lowlander]

Question is still there, but in the right place: https://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewt ... 06#p474706

[Peke]

Hi,
I guess you would like to have Album art for currently playing track on each Radio Stream?

[charmingnathan]

Hello,

Fortunately, there is only one radio stream, but the Radio Player on the website has to know where to look to locate the artwork, and at the moment, almost all of them are embedded within the .mp3 file.

Cheers.

[Peke]

Hi,
What is the source of your Radio stream, MM or standalone Stream encoder?

eg. play tracks in MM -> encode stream -> push to Radio Stream Server -> connect webpage radio player to stream -> Distribute stream thru webpage player without direct link to original stream. Or is is something else like MP3 files are hosted on cloud server -> radio stream is generated by online radio station system like https://centova.com/en/cast ?

I am Asking you as there is number of classes that reads image from Mp3 file and MMW can be scripted to auto save Track album art on playback to a specific file that can be easily resized and uploaded to server for showing in Web Player or if files are hosted online classes like https://github.com/shubhamjain/PHP-ID3 can be used to extract Image from file prior to playback and then shown in Player. This needs some work but it is feasible with some time and money with devs that created your site.

[charmingnathan]

Thanks for your message Peke.

The setup is pretty simple.

I use Radio D.J. as the playout system to the encoder to the Internet.

Media Monkey is used to edit the meta data within the .mp3 files, and embed the artwork in the file.

The problem is that I have the Radio Player on the website, which captures the images from the iTunes database from the metadata in the .mp3's, and I would like to change that to the artworks I have used within Media Monkey, for reasons I explained earlier.

The only method I have found for doing this is extracting the artworks, then re-labelling them in the format of ARTIST-TITLE, and putting them in their own directory, which as you can imagine with albums would be a very time consuming and tedious task.

I hope that explains the situation?

Cheers.