I just want to have the highest resolution, most correct album covers for my collection, which is difficult if I have a release with extra tracks compared to the digital release which has the highest quality cover art. So I would like to be able to use that cover art but keep my release the same.
Cheers.
Sometimes, but not always. And, as far as I’m aware, by doing this, if you did want to use the cover art for a special release, you would have to switch these settings back. I would propose a new menu which displays each cover art for a release group somewhat large, as well as the resolution.
Depending on how many of these you’re dealing with, you can drag-and-drop other cover art into Picard to override what’s it’s loaded from the release.
This feels to me like a requirement for an Album Metadata plugin that would get the metadata for the cover art images for the RG and for all the (other) releases in the RG and decide which one(s) to download.
That said, I have no idea whether V2 of Picard has the hooks needed to achieve this, and whether the plans for V3 include a more flexible plugin arrangement for Cover Art (and, as an aside, also for Genres and Lyrics).
@outsidecontext / @zas ?
A cover art source that checks all releases in the RG and downloads the largest one would be possible as a plugin. Actually the built-in cover art sources use the same interface also available for plugins.
I don’t currently know whether the CAA APIs will allow to do this efficiently or if it needs to download every single cover art to then compare them. That would need to be checked.
In general improvements to cover art handling would be very welcomed, including making use of multiple sources at once to select the best match and advanced filters for cover art (obey size and format restrictions, allow for resizing and format conversion). For the latter we have a Google Summer of Code project idea, so there is some chance this would be taken. But otherwise there are no specific plans for Picard 3.0 yet.
Is this available to review and comment on?
If you look at PICARD-2121 there are 5 other open tickets relating to Cover Art processing: PICARD-237, PICARD-860, PICARD-1020, PICARD-1241 & PICARD-2033.
An increasingly larger program, more and more dependencies and weaknesses.
