9 thoughts on “Screenscraping Album Artwork From The Linux Command Line”

1. 2013-04-22 15:42

   

   thameera says:

   I use beets (http://beets.radbox.org/) which does almost all the management of my 80+GB music library. It tags, fetches art, manages the directory structure and is totally customizable.

   Your script works well, there's an <relative> at the last line.

   Reply
   1. 2013-04-23 09:04

      

      Terence Eden says:

      I've started using beets as well. Bit of a pain to configure, but once it works it's incredible. I have found that it does miss some album art though - hence the script.

      Thanks for the correction - now amended.

      Reply
2. 2014-03-17 08:38

   

   David Griffith says:

   Albumart.org doesn't like it if you send a query that contains parenthesis. For example: "Devo-Recombo_DNA_(disc_1_of_2_-_Sequence_A)" won't yield any results. Abcde names directories like this for multi-disc packages. An apparently decent way around this is to lop off the string submitted to albumart at the first paren encountered. Another enhancement is to refrain from writing a cover.jpg file when it didn't find a cover image. Here's a sloppy diff-ish thing of what I'm talking about

   albumpath="$1" +title=echo $albumpath | cut -d'(' -f1 ... -encoded="$(perl -MURI::Escape -e 'print uri_escape($ARGV[0]);' "$albumpath")" +encoded="$(perl -MURI::Escape -e 'print uri_escape($ARGV[0]);' "$title")" ... -echo "Searching for: [$1]" +echo "Searching for: [$title]" ... +if [ -z $coverurl ] ; then + echo "Unable to find cover art for $title." + exit +fi

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3. 2014-08-27 20:47

   

   Oli says:

   A litte different concept ...

   #!/bin/bash

   if [ $# != 1 ] then echo "Need Path for Search!" exit 1 fi

   cd $1 find . -maxdepth 2 -mindepth 2 -type d | while read -r dir do albumpath="$dir"

   # Escape any problematic character
   encoded="$(perl -MURI::Escape -e 'print uri_escape($ARGV[0]);' "$albumpath")"
   
   # Skip if a cover.jpg exists in the directory
   if [ -f "$albumpath/cover.jpg" ]
   then
       echo "$albumpath/cover.jpg already exists"
       continue
   fi
   
   # Tell the user what is going on
   echo ""
   echo "Searching for: [$albumpath]"
   
   # scraping AlbumArt.org
   url="http://www.albumart.org/index.php?searchkey=$encoded&itempage=1&newsearch=1&searchindex=Music"
   echo "Searching ... [$url]"
   
   # Grab the first Amazon image without an underscore (usually the largest version)
   coverurl=`wget -qO - "$url" | grep -m 1 -o 'http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/*/[%0-9a-zA-Z.,-]*.jpg'`
   
   if [ "x" == "x$coverurl" ]
   then
       albumpath=`dirname "$albumpath"`
       echo "Neuer Versuch mit '$albumpath'"
       encoded="$(perl -MURI::Escape -e 'print uri_escape($ARGV[0]);' "$albumpath")"
       url="http://www.albumart.org/index.php?searchkey=$encoded&itempage=1&newsearch=1&searchindex=Music"
       coverurl=`wget -qO - "$url" | grep -m 1 -o 'http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/*/[%0-9a-zA-Z.,-]*.jpg'`
   fi
   
   if [ "x" != "x$coverurl" ]
   then
       echo "Cover URL: [$coverurl]"
       # Save the imager
       wget "$coverurl" -O "$dir/cover.jpg" 2$> /dev/null
   fi
   

   done

   Reply
4. 2014-12-05 17:24

   

   Will says:

   I had to use the following URL format for it to work today: url="http://www.albumart.org/index.php?searchk=abba+gold&itempage=1&newsearch=1&searchindex=Music"

   Reply
5. 2014-12-06 10:52

   

   Will says:

   And to get the above format with +'s in it, I found it useful to do this (since all my directory names use _ not spaces)

   GUTS OF MY SCRIPT

   albumpath="$1"

   Split albumpath into artist and album

   artist_input="${albumpath%/}" album_input="${albumpath##/}"

   I need to replace the underscores with a '+' character

   artist=${artist_input//[]/+} album=${album_input//[]/+}

   echo "artist: $artist" echo "album: $album"

   search_terms="$artist+$album"

   Scrape AlbumArt.org

   url="http://www.albumart.org/index.php?searchk=$search_terms&itempage=1&newsearch=1&searchindex=Music"

   echo "Searching ... [$url]" coverurl=wget -qO - "$url" | grep -m 1 -o 'http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/*/[%0-9a-zA-Z.,-]*.jpg'

   echo "Cover URL: [$coverurl]"

   Save the image jpg file

   wget "$coverurl" -O "$DEST_DIR/cover.jpg"

   RUNNING IT

   And running it like this:

   GetCoverArt.sh james_morrison/undiscovered

   gives this output: artist: james+morrison album: undiscovered

   Searching for album art for: [james_morrison/undiscovered] Searching for: [james+morrison+undiscovered] Searching ... [http://www.albumart.org/index.php?searchk=james+morrison+undiscovered&itempage=1&newsearch=1&searchindex=Music%5D Cover URL: [http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SAKEc0HEL.jpg%5D --2014-12-06 09:48:32-- http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SAKEc0HEL.jpg Resolving ecx.images-amazon.com (ecx.images-amazon.com)... 54.230.198.142, 54.230.199.201, 54.230.199.90, ... Connecting to ecx.images-amazon.com (ecx.images-amazon.com)|54.230.198.142|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 35448 (35K) [image/jpeg] Saving to: ‘/home/music/flac/james_morrison/undiscovered/cover.jpg’

   100%[======================================>] 35,448 --.-K/s in 0.02s

   2014-12-06 09:48:32 (1.85 MB/s) - ‘/home/music/flac/james_morrison/undiscovered/cover.jpg’ saved [35448/35448]

   DO ALL MUSIC

   And finally, to get cover art for ALL my music in one fell swoop, I ran this:

   for i in *; do for j in $i/*; do GetCoverArt.sh $j; done; done

   Reply
6. 2015-05-10 04:36

   

   Andrew Strong says:

   You may be interested to see that abcde now has the capability to download album art, I apologise for not using the approach that you suggested! The eventual successful patches came from the same thread on GoogleCode where your patch was suggested...

   Currently available only in the git version but it will go mainstream when 2.6.1 is released. The abcde FAQ in git has some detailed information on how to get it all working although sane defaults should guarantee a good result anyway. I am planning a web page with more detailed information, this will come out in a week or so...

   Reply
   1. 2015-05-10 11:26

      

      Terence Eden says:

      Brilliant news! Thanks Andrew 🙂

      Reply
7. 2015-05-22 02:33

   

   Andrew says:

   OK the preliminary web page is done:

   abcde: Downloading Album Art... http://www.andrews-corner.org/getalbumart.html

   Still a little fine tuning to do but it should definitely get the word out that abcde is ready for album art 🙂

   Reply