GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 151921
Add album-cover images as "filetype icons" for audio files and media
Last modified: 2006-04-02 08:43:25 UTC
Any plans to do the same thing for music files as with images? I mean, what about using the CD cover image as an icon for the music file or CD-ROM drive (when loaded), just like images and movies ? Please read bug 151665 for details and discussion before you comment.
In reply to comment #14 bug 151665 Thomas, (1) AFAIK, there are no "automated" ways of getting a picture of the band.. But it's an interesting idea, nonetheless :) If it's on multiple albums (as in; nautilus-media extracts the metadata and understands that it is covered by multiple albums), there are lots of possibilities[1] (read: 'magic' :). One reason it might be important is association[2]. Say you've got 20 CDs that you have also ripped onto your computer. In order to make it easier for you to recognize the albums, we show you thumbnails of the CD covers (which you know by heart) instead of making you parse the filenames (text). It would also make it easier to distinguish from different albums in a directory that contains many. (2) The movie is already on your disk, so there shouldn't be any copyright problems. Granted. But the music should be originated from a hardcopy CD or some online legal music vendor, and so we could (?) assume that you are allowed to download the CD cover art. FYI, in many cases (at least IDv3, IIRC) the cover art can be included as metadata as well. (3) Thanks ;) (4) From my understanding, nautilus does not require nautilus-media in order to operate. Nautilus-media is a package created for the purpose of providing the user with extended metadata about audio/video media through the nautilus UI. Of course, I don't know, but that is my assumption - solely based on the names of the packages :D 1: 1 The easy one: pick the first album. 2 Use the album that has the most associated songs in the current directory, or fallback to 1 if it's the only one. I'm sure there are other, worse alternatives :) 2: This might go the other way around as well, because we might get the wrong data from the server, or we might get two sets of data and just use the first one (because we want to make it easy) - but then it turns out that we should've used the second dataset. For example, if the user has an album called "Free as in beer", featuring the artist "I am Elvis". Lets also assume that the artist "Intraweb" has released an album of the same name. Now, the metadata and filenames available on the users audio files isn't enough to properly identify the CD in question, so we make a mistake, and present the cover art for "Intraweb"'s CD. This would confuse the user more than help him :) In any case, when there is any doubt as to the identity of the band or album, the cover art should be ditched and we should present the user with the default MIME-type.
One question to consider here is how people typically organise audio files on their hard disk. I'd guess most people probably have a folder for each album anyway (since that's how most ripping software is set up by default), in which case, wouldn't the icon normally be the same for every file in a given folder with this proposal? That doesn't really sound terribly useful. What might be more attractive (if still not mind-blowingly useful) would be for the album's folder icon to include the cover art, which is pretty much what Windows XP does.
nautilus-media is discontinued.
What replaces it?