Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] recognition of CD/DVD's w/ cover art

[Forrest L Norvell <ogd aoaioxxysz net>]

On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 01:00:26PM -0700, Alan wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 02:08:20PM -0500, johan kdks wrote:
> > The open source project my friend uses is plutohome.org.  But I
> > can't use it because it's a big home automation and media server
> > that does all sorts of stuff.  All I'm looking for is just the 1
> > tiny piece--the accurate CD + DVD recognition engine that shows
> > cover art and all the attributes for a disc.  Preferably
> > integrated into the KDE or Gnome desktop, like Windows does, so
> > you always see what's now playing.  Anybody know if there's a
> > module that does this?  Or if not, why nobody else is doing this
> > for Linux?
> 
> Check out what the musicbrainz project (webserver) does for this.  They
> figure out the artist/album, and then grab the cover art from amazon,
> having figured out the magic to get to the appropriate image.   The
> Musicbrainz system already has the track recognition based on a
> fingerprint and not relying on id3 tags, (which IIRC is already linked
> into RB, not sure if it's used yet or not), and it has code to link into
> amazon images based on album/artist.  It makes sense that this all
> matches up with this functionality needed in RB.

Musicbrainz's heuristic is also quite often wrong (especially for
albums that have been released multiple times with different cover
art), which is why you need a system that allows the user to choose
between possible alternatives after the query's completed. After
reading about amaroK here, I spent some time playing around with it
recently, and its solution -- an album art browser that runs batch
queries to fetch (and then, importantly, choose the correct version
of) album art from Amazon, as well as allowing you to use your own
images -- seems to be about the best thing going.

The only thing that bugs me about using Amazon (aside from the
craptastic quality of a lot of their cover images) is that they're a
proprietary data source. Does anyone know if you're violating any of
their Terms of Service for using their data for our own applications?
I know that some shareware applications for the Mac (to add album art
to iTunes) have dropped support for auto-finding images from Amazon
over legal concerns.

I would guess that what Plutohome is using is IMDB data, as they've
got pretty clean and complete data and, like Amazon, a well-defined
Web API for getting at it. I don't know what they use for CDs, but if
it's accurate even for more obscure releases, it's definitely not
Amazon / FreeDB / CDDB, as all of those regularly have problems with
CDs in my collection (I've ripped like 400 CDs in the last month --
more labor-intensive than it sounds -- so I know this really well).

Forrest

-- 
       . . . the self-reflecting image of a narcotized mind . . .
ozymandias G desiderata     ogd aoaioxxysz net     desperate, deathless
(415)823-6356       http://www.pushby.com/forrest/       ::AOAIOXXYSZ::