arttools

This plugin adds a whole toolbox to deal with cover art.

Warning: This plugin is currently under development. Things might change without noted anywhere.

Configuration

To load the plugin just add arttools to your plugins configuration.

Basic concepts

There are some basic concepts and assumptions which are used through the whole plugin.

Bad art

The plugin tries to classify the art into two categories: good and bad. Therefore two simple rules are taken:

• Greater (in pixels) the images are better than smaller
• Squared images are better than unsquared (hence the aspect ratio is near 1.0)

One can configure the minimum size and aspect ratio using the configuration using the size_thresh (defaults to 200 pixels) and aspect_ratio_thresh (defaults to 0.8) configuration option. When checking the size, the smaller dimension is used so an image with a size of 190x210 pixels is considered as bad because the smaller side is less than 200 pixels. The aspect ratio as always calculated such the result is lower than or equal to 1.0. That means two images with a size of 200x300 and 300x200 have the same aspect ratio.

Art files

Art files can be associated to an album. They are called bound art here. To choose the best art, it is necessary to have more than one art file. They have to be placed inside the album folder and named like configured with the names option (defaults to cover only).

Commands

A lot of commands for various purposes are added. Every command takes a query to specify which album is affected. Note that all commands work with albums not single items. To test which album will match a specific query one can use beet ls -a <query>.

• listboundart: Prints a list of file names and paths to the art files bound to the albums matching the given query.
• listbadboundart: Prints a list of file names and paths to the art files bound to the albums matching the given query which are considered as bad.
• listart: Prints a list of file names and paths to all found art files. Adding -v (or --verbose) to the command will add information about the size of the image and the resulting aspect ratio.
• copyboundart: Copy all bound art files into a single directory specified with -d. The files will be named using the template $albumartist - $album. Adding -n (or --no-action) will only print the files to copy without actually copying them.
• chooseart: This command tries to figure out which art file is the best one and bound it to the album. Adding -n (or --no-action) will only print the files which would be chosen without changing anything.
• deleteunusedart: After you ran chooseart, all art files are still present. To remove the ones which are not bound to the album, use this command. Only art files matching the configured names will be removed. Adding -n (or --no-action) will only print the files to delete without doing so.
• artcollage: Takes the bound art of all matched albums and creates a collage of them. The command tries to create square image if possible. It takes two options: -o (or --out) specifies the output file name and path and -s (or --size) which defines the size of a single album art inside the collage in pixels. The latter one may be set via configuration file using the collage_tilesize option.

Future

Two things are still missing for the plugin: A command to collect possible art files from various sources and one which starts a webserver so the user can choose the art to bound to the album using a web browser.