Grainy Artwork In E-touch

[urbecrisch]

I just went through my entire collection and upgraded my cover art (whew!).  Most of my art work is 301x300 and goes up to 500x500.  It seems the artwork looks grainy in E-Touch but fine in my other JB program.  Is there something I can do to improve this in E-Touch?

[Shaggydo]

that happened to me.  I have the artwork for each album in its own folder and name that cover.jpg  i used etouch to make some tumbnail and somehow all the artwork got messed up,so what i did was a full image search , deleted every single that did not had the cover.jpg name fire up etouch again redone the thumnails, then everything came out ok, big and clear covers.

[urbecrisch]

So if I have a few images that say folder.jpg then all images will be blurry?  I need to have every image named Cover.jpg right?

[Barcrest]

So if I have a few images that say folder.jpg then all images will be blurry?  I need to have every image named Cover.jpg right?

No that shouldn't matter. If you have a cover.jpg set around 500x500 and a smaller one set to about 170x170 called coversmall.jpg it should all look fine. The coversmall is used for the album paging and the larger cover.jpg is used on the nowplaying screen and track listing screen.

There shouldn't be any difference in quality over e-touch and any other app displaying those images really. If you look around the forum you will see screenshots of peoples jukeboxes and how the covers should look. Are you using first cover found? If so it will pick up the first cover alphabetically which could be a lowres file, it is better to specify the filename and create the covers as described.

[urbecrisch]

I have one image of the coverart in each artist's folder called Cover.jpg  When I run Etouch now I get an error:

Error Occured: 481
Description: Invalid Picture
Module: Form 1
Function: show_featured_album

Not sure what's wrong.  Should I create coversmall.jpg for each album with Etouch config program?

[Barcrest]

Sounds like you have an image named with a .jpg extension that is not actually a JPG file. Most likely a BMP or PNG file. You need to verify all the cover.jpg files you have are actually JPG files.

[urbecrisch]

Looks like when I scrolled down to the artist's starting with "U", I got an error message.  I took out my music starting with "U" and the problem dissapeared so I'll retag the "U" artwork and try again.  I'll update wheather or not it worked.

[heretic]

my coversmall images are very grainy (pixelated). The larger cover images are fine. A 2"x2" image at 170x170 pixels should be much clearer, shouldn't it?

[Norman Marshall]

when i google for artwork i look for 500x500 or higher, i open the image to get the full size then i save it to the artist folder, name it cover.jpg then copy and paste the same image and rename it to coversmall.jpg, this gives me shit hot album art.

[Barcrest]

when i google for artwork i look for 500x500 or higher, i open the image to get the full size then i save it to the artist folder, name it cover.jpg then copy and paste the same image and rename it to coversmall.jpg, this gives me shit hot album art.

You should re-size you coversmall to 170 x 170. Use irfanview and the quality will be the same but paging albums will much quicker.

[Cary_B]

I've been playing around with irfanview, and compairing it to the GENERATE IMAGE THUMBNAILS function in the config.exe program, and while the quality of the file made by irfanview is better, it is only slightly better.  I think that the best option would be to try and build your library using this feature, but make it, say 200 x 200 or 250 x 250 and see how it slows your computer down.  I am using 170 x 170, and think that I will try about 225 x 225 myself.  Just to see how much it slows down my computer.

[Cary_B]

Just ran the update, set it at 225 x 225 and the coversmall.jpg's look a bunch clearer, and it didn't slow the program down noticably at all.  Give it a try.  I might even try 300 x 300 next.  (P.S. my jukebox computer is an old Pentium 600mhz notebook, with 768mg of ram.  REALLLLY old.)

[bzpilot]

Just ran the update, set it at 225 x 225 and the coversmall.jpg's look a bunch clearer, and it didn't slow the program down noticably at all.  Give it a try.  I might even try 300 x 300 next.  (P.S. my jukebox computer is an old Pentium 600mhz notebook, with 768mg of ram.  REALLLLY old.)

Anything over about 460x460 for cover.jpg (Track listing, Now Playing) and 165x165 for coversmall.jpg (this was for the standard 12 album cover art on Album Page) is a waste because they will not show up any better on the jukebox because of the size of the image displayed.  That is why the recommended sizes were 500x500 and 170x170 respectively.  And now that the actual cover.jpg images have been reduced in latest skins so 500x500 is overkill but since those images are only being shown one per page the single larger image will not slow down E-touch.  As for the coversmall.jpg those image sizes have remained the same size and 170x170 should page nicely without delay on most computers and this size is good for 12 or higher Album Cover on the Album Page.  If you use a 6 Album Cover the coversmall.jpg at 170x170 may appear grainy but that should be the only instance it does.  With a 6 Album Cover you could probably get away with using just the single cover.jpg for both or if you want the best paging performance on the Album Page with the 6 Album cover use 250x250 images (anything larger would be a waste).

BE AWARE - Some programs are better than others in resizing also!  I personally used Music Match with a plug-in to do all mine - 1800 plus albums in just a couple minutes with great results.  Just search on here for cover art size / resizing it's all been discussed before.