High Quality Album Art?

[James77]

Just wondering where people get really high quality album art? I am trying to get all the covers 500x500 or higher.


Thanks

[Cary_B]

Believe it or not, Wal-Mart.com has some of the best. Not over 500x500 though.

Otherwise, just use Google image search and check for use Images Showing = extra large.  Works sometimes

[James77]

Cool,
I will check out WallyWorld

[justtaint]

I was using a program called Album Art Downloader, it allowed me to pick which album art I wanted.  Nowadays I'm lazy and I use whatever Tag&Rename picks for me.

[eist1]

Buy.com also has all 500x500 images, very good quality. I use both Walmart and Buy.com

[Barcrest]

Don't forget in freebox you don't want the images to be much larger than 320 x 320 otherwise you might find it sluggish paging through albums.

[kizer]

Amen. I spent a while reducing mine because they where to big. I did find a program that was basically command line that I drag and drop all my images on and it reduces the size down to 320x320. If anybody wants it remind me via PM.

[andowhy]

If you are after high quality covers have a look at http://www.allcdcovers.com/index.php - usually 1mb plus per image file.

[Novalak]

http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe

Microsoft tool, right click re size

you can highlight as many as you want also


on the point of 320x320, why so small? i use 500x500, your saying im speed is affected by this?

[squirrellydw]

if you have a fast PC probably not but if its sorta old yes.

[mfacer]

is there a tool which would look up album covers automatically? maybe you point it to your albums (folders) and enter websites for it to lookup? (allcd, amazon, walmart etc)

[Barcrest]

on the point of 320x320, why so small? i use 500x500, your saying im speed is affected by this?

The speed degredation is due to the size of the image. Freebox has to load up and re-size 12 images so the smaller the filesize the better as this is 12 disc reads. I have found 320 x 320 to be a good comprimise of quality and mainting speed.

[James77]

andowhy,

Allcdcovers has some really nice scans, thanks.  I noticed that some of them are not 500x500, or 1000x1000, but rather 1200x1030, some odd sizes.  I wonder why that is?
  I am worried now that Freebox will be a little slow.  I will just have to make a test run of a few albums and see how it loads.
eist1, buy.com has nice scans too.

Thanks

[Barcrest]

Test it with large album covers and smaller covers. You will see it's quicker with smaller covers. It is not the fault of freebox just the fact it takes longer to load 12 big images as opposed to 12 smaller ones.

[frosty]

I have been coding a way around this, here it is in a nutshell

1) grab the highest quality art you can, drop it in your album folders.
2) use config 6 to build the database, put a check in "chache album art".
3) during the build, the config will put a thumbnail size image in a cache folder inside the freebox directory.
4) freebox can then pull the thumbnails from the cache folder for album pages, etc. and full sized image from the album folder for the track selection screen, now playing screen, etc.

This change is Dependant on the new database back end being integrated into freebox though.

Frosty