Amazon MP3
May 12th 2008 10:45 pm
So I’m a pretty big fan of the Amazon MP3 Music Store. It has had very few tracks which I wanted to grab which weren’t available. It’s cheaper than the iTunes Music Store as well. I realize this is the case only because the music labels are tired of getting their terms dictated to them by Apple so they decided to open up the competition and make the deal more enticing. But that works in my favor so that’s awesome. Only thing I’m afraid of is that that music labels will try to do something dumb and try to start adding DRM copy protection to the music again (which breaks the music on my players). But anyways, back to my original point: Amazon’s MP3s even come with the cover art built-in to the track.
I noticed this when I tried playing some of my purchased tracks on my laptop this past underway with Amarok, and noticed that it displayed the cover art just fine. After a bit of work now that I’m back in port I’ve managed to add display of built-in cover art to JuK as well. The patch is available as an attachment to KDE bug 103118. In addition (what the bug was reported against) if no cover is present JuK will look for cover.jpg in the same directory as the music file like many other media players do. No screenshot, it looks just like normal JuK cover art support, only JuK pulls from more sources with the patch.
As far as where this lands I’ll have to email core-devel. I returned to port way too late for the 4.1 feature list :) so this may have to wait for 4.2 (depending on how much toward “bugfix” people are willing to lean). But if people want to test that’s fine. ;)
On a related note, if you’ve been using JuK and notice a bug that is egregrious (i.e. you can’t even play audio because JuK always crashes when you click Next, you can’t add files, etc.) please leave me a comment so I can prioritize. I have limited time so I’d like to make good use of it in time for KDE 4.1.
I already know of the fact that you can’t seem to drag-and-drop tracks to playlists anymore for instance (which hampers my routine at least so I’ll try and fix that soon).
Too bad Amazon MP3 seems to be US-only.
There isn’t a single good online music store in Argentina. No wonder there’s so much piracy. (well, that and the people selling pirated CDs in the train). I pirate music just for its convenience; looking forward to “legalize” all I downloaded, once a decent online music store shows up.
It’s really cool stuff, thanks. Umm… do you see any chance to JuK search cover on some sites (such as Amazon) if it not find cover anywhere? Or it’s an Amarok-only feature? I love JuK, because it has an easier interface than Amarok, and JuK seems faster to me.
Nicolas: Yeah, someday I think more people will clue in on the fact that DRM simply loses more sales due to inconvenienced customers than they will ever gain by trying to stop piracy. It takes only one pirate to create a huge digital distribution ring, and DRM has never stopped them before.
hrongyorgy: JuK can search for cover art over the Internet (currently it uses Yahoo!) You may have to use JuK SVN (4.0 branch or trunk), or 4.0.5 if we release that because I believe it was crashy prior due to JuK improperly using some kdelibs code. Amazon is not used because the licensing terms are too restrictive IMO. However JuK does not have a feature for automatically downloading cover art for songs missing it, and if you select all tracks without cover art and try to set a cover you will set that 1 cover to all those tracks, which is probably not what you want.
Just thought I’d add that there are other file names that there are other file names commonly kept in album directories for cover art. The ones I know of are folder.jpg and album.jpg