Album art grabber not working

[ShadowTD]

Looking through the forums, it seems that quite a few people are struggling with the album art grabber not working. I'm just building a VortexBox for a friend who wants a multi-room system and the problem seems to be present with both 2.4 and 2.5 beta.

I did briefly see a message in the FLAC mirror log about the Amazon grabber exceeding it's useage, or something like that. Looking at the PHP for covergrabber, I can see an AWS key pair in there - perhaps this account has hit some kind of limit if all Vortexboxes ever are using it? I registered for the free AWS tier myself, generated a key pair and put it in but it made no difference - maybe there's an API in my AWS dashboard I need to enable?

Can anyone familiar with this shed any light on the situation?

[bucketbiochemist]

Hi Shadow,

I posted on another thread about the same issue, but I hadn't noticed the log entry. When I looked at my log file, I saw (as an example):
Getting cover art for /storage/music/flac/The_English_Beat_-_Here_We_Go_Love ... Amazon throttled for excessive usage. Try again later. No cover art found on Amazon.com, trying Google Images. No cover art found on Google Images Done getting cover art for /storage/music/flac/The_English_Beat_-_Here_We_Go_Love The last date I saw good cover art grabbing was 2/11, but when I did it again on 2/17 it didn't work.

Best,

Jim

[SeanMiddleton]

Most people report this problem. I know that the VB software used to use Amazon, Discogs, Musicbrainz.... to get tags and artwork. Amazon no longer allows this and Discogs requires a form of registration to allow apps to come in and grab artwork. You have to register with Discogs now if you use MP3 tag for example. Its free and easy enough. Perhaps the VB software isn't registered with Discogs ?? Does anybody know what the underlying app in VB is called, perhaps it has a help page or whatever to get in there and fix this problem

[vbbob]

A great alternative on VB is BLISS

https://www.blisshq.com/

[ShadowTD]

Thanks for everyone's comments. covergrabber.php is the part of vortexbox that does the grabbing. I'm aware of Bliss but this VB is for a friend of mine and I'm handing it over at the weekend. I was hoping to get the original functionality working. It seems that the VB devs aren't able to devote that much time to the project any more.

[Rister]

Can't this functionality be substituted with something else that's newer and is working?

[SeanMiddleton]

Thanks for everyone's comments. covergrabber.php is the part of vortexbox that does the grabbing. I'm aware of Bliss but this VB is for a friend of mine and I'm handing it over at the weekend. I was hoping to get the original functionality working. It seems that the VB devs aren't able to devote that much time to the project any more.

I checked out covergrabber.php and its very much an Amazon.com focused app. Amazon have for some time blocked use of their website for music tagging and cover art grabbing, so clearly vortexbox ripper will no longer add cover art. It needs re-writing using discogs.com. Its a little annoying that vortexbox appears to be no longer being updated/supported, this has been the case for some time. If the developers no longer have the desire/time to support it then open it up fully to the open source community to consider taking on. Shame to just keep it secret and let it die.

[drp101]

I just updated my VB from 2.2 to 2.4. 2.2 had Bliss integrated. With the update, I seem to have lost access to cover art. Not too cool....

[Doris1997]

You can add Bliss manually, in the VortexBox GUI on the left go to the bottom icon select “VortexBox Upgrade” and install Bliss!

[SeanMiddleton]

You can add Bliss manually, in the VortexBox GUI on the left go to the bottom icon select “VortexBox Upgrade” and install Bliss!

But Bliss is subscription after 100 fixes.

[Doris1997]

Understood

[bucketbiochemist]

Reviving this thread to see if anyone has been able to revive covergrabber.php.

I played with it and it appears to have the ability to query google images if amazon failed, however upon further inspection it used an outdated google API (ajax). Maybe someone here is familiar enough with the new google API (custom search?) to be able to revive?

I know bliss is an option, however I was happy with covergrabber in it's functional incarnation -- worked most of the time and free.

[Alaric]

I just upgraded to 2.5 - I was on 2.4 with Fedora 23 and that was adding art fine. So i think it MUST be possible. The how I'm not sure!

[lawrence2357]

Reviving this thread to see if anyone has been able to revive covergrabber.php.

I played with it and it appears to have the ability to query google images if amazon failed, however upon further inspection it used an outdated google API (ajax). Maybe someone here is familiar enough with the new google API (custom search?) to be able to revive?

I know bliss is an option, however I was happy with covergrabber in it's functional incarnation -- worked most of the time and free.

Reviving this thread again to see if anyone can have a go at changing covergrabber to work with the new Google API? It would be amazing if we could get it to work. I'm happy to do some legwork under guidance of someone more talented than myself as a recent upgrade to 2.5 had renewed my interest in getting my Liv Zen to work fully.

[bucketbiochemist]

Hello All,

I was able to get some cover art functionality back by editing the sacad settings in covergrabber.php. I reduced the target image size, and added the tolerance setting to allow for a broad range of image sizes.


$query = 'sacad "' . $q_artist . '" "' . $q_album . '" 600 -t50 ' . $folder . '/cover.jpg';


Not sure if it will work for others, it's working better for me than the default. I can supply my edited covergrabber.php if people are interested. Didn't see how to post a shared file here.


Best,

Jim