Wilde About Computers

My iPod Classic locked up one too many times, so this Christmas I bought myself a Zune 2. This, combined with finding myself frequently using Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 to listen to music, inspired me to update my MP3 collection with more complete tags, including album cover art. I soon discovered that collecting and maintaining album art for your music collection is a hobby unto itself with numerous articles and programs available to support the habit. After much research and experimentation what follows are my conclusions as well the “workflow” I’ve settled on for my needs.

My MP3 collection has been built from my CD collection over the years using Audiograbber with the LAME codec, but this article will not cover the process of ripping CDs and LPs, or the various ways one can buy and download music. I am assuming you have an MP3 collection where each tune is tagged with (at least) the track title, track artist, and album title. Other tags such as genre, release year, track number, etc. are unrelated to this article, although I must comment that while the genre tag is really helpful when picking stuff to play, it’s a terribly subjective classification system that I’ve pared way down in Tag Clinic.

Also note that I care only about ID3V2.3 UTF-16 tags.  Using Tag Clinic I delete all ID3v1 tags so they won’t interfere or take precedence over the V2.3’s. Maybe this is a mistake but it works for me.

My collection is saved in a folder tree, which I used MediaMonkey to create. I realize other programs can create a folder system but I found MediaMonkey’s “Auto Organize files” function easiest to use.

Here’s a simulation of such a folder tree, where the MP3’s are saved in album folders, which are in turn saved in artist folders:

Since my MP3 collection must be compatible with a Zune 2, MCE 2005, TwonkyMedia, iTunes, MP3Toys (a cool Windows player), and eventually Vista’s Media Center, I decided to embed the album art in my MP3 files as well as save the art in their album folders. To me this is a way to prevent inadvertently losing the art or its association with the MP3s. This also ensures compatibility with whatever player I might want to use.  I read an article once where the writer compared keeping album art separate and external from the music files as analogous to keeping EXIF data separate from digital photos.

Media Center 2005 note – when playing any tune with embedded album art MCE 2005 displays a black box in place of the art (it displays the art properly in all other MCE screens). The solution to this bug is to either not embed art OR uninstall Internet Explorer 7.  I chose the latter.

Zune 2 note – To get the best looking album art in the current Zune 2 software use either embedded art or save it in the tune’s folder under the name ZuneCustomAlbumArt.jpg, which the Zune software will convert into a 240×240 image and use.

An image size of 240×240 looks great on the Zune 2’s screen, but in iTunes Coverflow, MP3Toys player, or even Media Center larger is better.  So I wanted my album art to have the highest resolution that’s readily available. Given this criteria I’ve settled on the following album cover art sources, in order of art quality: iTunes (usually 600×600), Walmart (usually 500×500), and Amazon (varies from iTunes-quality to terrible). I appreciate the quality of the art provided by iTunes, Amazon and Walmart so I try to reciprocate by patronizing their businesses.

My Workflow Begins with Tag Clinic

Before beginning my search for album art I use Tag Clinic to ensure that all Artist and Title fields are simplified and devoid of extraneous text (e.g., “(Album Version)”, “Stevie Wonder feat. Sanjaya”). I want the search to be as automatic and hands-free as possible. Tag Clinic is my first and still primary MP3 tag editor. Its GUI is somewhat like a spreadsheet, complete with the ability to quickly perform operations on rows of tunes and columns of tag fields.

You can use whatever tag editor you prefer but be sure to begin with MP3’s having artist, track title, and album title tags that are likely to be matched by a store’s search engine.

Then iTunes

Open iTunes. Clear out any existing library and playlist data. Using Windows Explorer, open the folder containing your ripped music that’s missing album art and search for all *.mp3 files. Select All and drag the group selection into the iTunes window. After iTunes automatically runs a couple of processes on the tunes go to the Advanced menu and select Get Album Art. Take a break while it searches for art.

I’ve read forum posts that say iTunes occasionally picks the wrong album art — sometimes from the wrong artist — but I haven’t experienced this problem. Admittedly, I’m not terribly concerned about 100% accuracy when it comes to matching the cover with the album title, like different releases or whatnot; just give me some album art that looks good, is from the target artist, and preferably matches the album’s title. So far all three criteria have been met with about 95% accuracy using this workflow.

When iTunes finishes its search it’ll display a message if it couldn’t find art for all albums. Chances are you’ll see this message. It gives you the opportunity to save the list of albums without art to a text file. Save this report and then open it in Notepad.

Switch to the iTunes Store (Search). Start searching for the tune or album’s title and artist’s name listed in the report. In most cases you’ll find the desired album. Get Info for the target tune and make notes in the report about where your tag data differs from iTunes’. Often the album name is slightly different, or “The” must be added or removed from the artist’s name. Make your “list of changes needed” in the report and then switch back to your music library. Use Get Info for at least one track in every album that’s missing album art so that the tunes’s info will match the Store’s info.  Then Get Album Art again.

You should end up with a fairly short report this time. There always seems to be a few tunes that aren’t found despite the fact that the iTunes store sells the album and you’ve made the Get Info boxes match way beyond what is probably needed. I read one forum comment where a guy discovered that adding a space to the end of an album title fixed one nagging “no match”, but that’s never worked for me so I’d love to know why seemingly perfect matches sometimes don’t work.

Next Up: iTSfv

Now run an incredible program called iTSfv (iTunes Store File Validator).  I have yet to tap its full potential, and it’s probably even more wonderful to someone who uses iTunes exclusively. I use it for three of its many talents: to embed iTunes’ art in my tunes and create the desired JPEG copies of the art in album folder, to give me a list of all albums that still need album art, and to automatically fill in the Album Artist tag.

Saved Art – I save three copies of the album art in each album folder. Some of these are holdovers from the past and may be redundant, but drive space is cheap so I keep ‘em. They are named: “folder.jpg” (used by Windows Explorer and some programs to display art), “artwork.jpg” (a backup of the original art in case Windows Media Player or some other app overwrites folder.jpg), and “AlbumArtSmall.jpg” (because I’ve seen enough references to it so something must use it?). As I write this the redundancy is glaring, since the art is embedded and these three files are exact copies, but I haven’t figured out which one(s) can be considered 100% useless given XP’s and Vista’s idiosyncrasies as well as those of the various hardware and software players I’m using now and may use in the future.

The Album Artist tag – (aka. TPE2 and “Band”) I’m like a dog or primitive man: I respond to experiences by believing there’s a cause and effect. My experience with MCE 2005 is it will list any tune with an empty Album Artist field as being from an “unknown album,” despite the presence of album title info in the tag. So I doggedly ensure that every tune has the Album Artist filled in properly.  The Album Artist tag is also handy when it comes to compilation albums containing tracks from multiple artists: the Artist will differ while the Album Artist is “Various Artists” for every track in a multi-artist album. Programs like MediaMonkey take advantage of this tag when organizing your library. I vote for the Album Artist tag!

Back to iTSfv, it’s an add-in for iTunes and both must be open. If you run iTSfv it’ll spawn iTunes.

Like I said, iTSfv is a feature-rich program with many, many options — and it’s evolving constantly — so rather than list every possible option, here are the main ones I enable:

• * Check for tracks without Artwork
• * Check for low resolution Artwork
• * Check for album folders without Folder.jpg
• * Fill in missing Album Artist tag
• * Embed Artwork to track from iTunes or Artwork.jpg

Select all your tracks in iTunes and then click Validate Selected Tracks in iTSfv. It’ll munch through all your tracks and perform all of the above tasks. Afterwards, you’ll find the three JPEG files mentioned above, and all tunes that iTunes found art for will have the art embedded. Sweet, huh?

You’ll also have a report listing all folders and tunes that are still missing album art. Save or print this report and then close iTSfv, followed by closing iTunes (iTunes will complain if you don’t close an add-in like iTSfv first).

Mp3tag

This is when another neat program named Mp3tag comes into play. It does far more than just help with album art, but in this article I’ll be touching on just a few of its many capabilities.

Mp3tag needs a script installed before it can search for album art in Walmart’s site so go to this link, download the script and install it.

Now run Mp3tag and open the folder containing the tunes you’ve been working on. Sort the tunes list by Album and find the first album that’s missing art. Select all tunes in that album, open the Tag Sources menu and select “Cover__ Walmart”. A dialog box containing the search criteria will appear. It’ll list the artist and album name without punctuation. I sometimes clean up the search criteria a bit, like when the artist is listed twice or something else bugs me (experience counts here as much as it does when dealing with any search engine). Click OK and you may get a hit.

The following screen shot represents a successful match based on the search criteria, “Joni Mitchell Chalk Mark In A Rain Storm”.

Perfect!  Click on the diskette icon and save at least one copy of the art and name it folder.jpg (repeat for any other art file names you want it saved as). Then click OK to embed the art in the MP3 file — or files if you selected more than one in Mp3tag.

If the Walmart script doesn’t find a match you can try modifying the search criteria or just close the script and open the Walmart site in a browser and search for the album manually. Often the latter is the most efficient “plan B” because, as with iTunes, search criteria that should work sometimes doesn’t, for reasons that are beyond me.

Here’s an example where I searched for “joni mitchell chalk” in Walmart’s online music store. Bingo!

Click on “Enlarge image” to get a new window containing the album art at 500×500 resolution. Then simply left-click and drag the full-size image to the album art box in Mp3tag.

Now right-click on the art in Mp3tag and select Add Cover to save it as folder.jpg. Then select File | Save in Mp3tag’s top menu to embed the art in the MP3 file. Be sure to save the art before moving to the next tune in Mp3tag or you’ll have to redo your work.

If Walmart doesn’t sell the album go to the Tag Sources menu in Mp3tag and use the Amazon.com script to search for the album in Amazon’s store. You may be lucky and find a customer-contributed art file that’s on par with what iTunes uses so by all means use the highest-res art you can find — if that matters to you.

Sometimes you’ll discover that a particular album’s art is really difficult to find but that the associated tunes appear on another album for which art is readily available. That’s when I give up and reassign the tunes to the album with art available. Of course, if you still have the original CD jewel boxes and a flatbed scanner you can always scan in the art from the CD’s cover.

Eventually, you’ll have album art for your entire MP3 collection and that’s cause for celebration!

I recommend employing two types of backups: an occasional infrastructure backup and a much more frequent data backup.

Infrastructure Backup

Imagine if you could take a whole-body snapshot of yourself at 25 and then when you become ill or die you could be restored from that snapshot?  Nice, huh?

By "infrastructure" I mean the contents of your C: drive: Windows, all your programs, all updates to Windows and programs, and all your personal settings. This stuff rarely changes, so why back it up daily or even weekly? Why force yourself to use larger capacity media so frequently?  Backing up the whole enchilada takes a long time, too, which discourages you from making a daily backup.

Recovering using an infrastructure backup is a heck of a lot faster than rebuilding your C: drive from scratch. It’s also better than using the  "Recovery Partition" on a typical store-bought PC because the infrastructure backup includes all your programs — not just the ones that came with your PC — as well as your personal settings and and updates. Maybe you removed a lot of crapware that came on your PC; why start over with all that?

To make an infrastructure backup I recommend BootIt. It comes with a program that creates a bootable floppy or CD for "partition work". You boot your PC with this media, click on the Partition Work icon, select the Image function, and create an image of your C: drive onto an external hard drive. I prefer using an IDE-to-USB adapter so the external drive can be a bare 3.5" or 2.5" hard drive (either of which will fit in a safe-deposit box). Store this drive off site. 

If you later make substantial changes to your system, like installing several new programs or a new Office suite, retrieve your infrastructure backup from off site and make a new image. Most modern 3.5-inch drives can hold several such images.  Image every PC in your home or office using this method.

This way, if your hard drive becomes corrupted by a virus or malfunction, or simply dies, you can restore it or its replacement to the exact computing environment you were using when the infrastructure backup was made.

Data Backup

Your "data" probably consists of the contents of your "My Documents" folder, your e-mail and address book (if you use an e-mail client like Outlook or Outlook Express), your Favorites, and any data saved by programs like Quicken. This stuff changes much more frequently than does the PC’s infrastructure. For backing up data I recommend SyncBack or SyncBackSE.  Back up daily or at least weekly. In a later article I’ll describe how I’ve automated this process so that in the middle of the night my PC wakes up, wakes up the backup drive or PC, performs the backup and then both machines are put into Standby mode.

Use optical media, a flash drive, or an external USB drive — whichever media has sufficient capacity for your data. I prefer using three hard drives: alternating between two of them on a daily basis and using the third to periodically make a backup that’s stored off site.  Why alternate drives daily? If you accidentally delete a file or some of its contents you may be able to find its prior version on the alternate or off-site drive.

That’s it.  Is it clear to you?

A kind person at Microsoft told me that the current version 3.01 of Windows Desktop Search (WDS) allows searching of multiple Outlook PST files even when they’re not all mounted in the current profile.

Say what?

When using earlier versions of WDS, when you run Outlook it must open all the PST files that you want WDS to index. Now, with WDS v3.01, you need only create a profile that mounts (opens) all your PST files but you don’t need to actually use that profile;  you can use another profile that mounts, for example, just the currently active PST file (I divide my PST files up by year, so my active PST file is “Outlook 2007″ — the older ones don’t change so I don’t really want to open them every time I run Outlook).

 Please note that I have not tested this yet.  At this point I’m just relaying a conclusion based on recent correspondence with a person at Microsoft who has been helpful and accurate in the past.