My whish: add covers

It would be fine, that every user of MB who adds releases includes the covers. At least the front- and back-cover.

4 Likes

Hi @Alfg.
I add the releases I have in hands because primarily it helps me for some stuff and if other people can benefit of it, so good.
But I really have no time to get a scan out of its drawer, plug it in, scan, crop, upload, etc.
And having the release in hands, there is no immediate benefit for me to have the scan in MB anyway. :slight_smile:

4 Likes

I generally scan and upload the back / spines of CDs or pages from booklets to provide providence for edits I make. Iā€™ve pretty much given up uploading covers because of one person that more often than not blocks them with ā€œNoā€ votes. Instead, I clean up the cover images and upload them to fanart.tv because album covers is one of their specialties, and they maintain high quality standards for the artwork. I set Picard to check for cover art on fanart.tv first when Iā€™m tagging my collection.

2 Likes

Would be. Lead by example. :slight_smile:

Iā€™m still a beginner, but I plan to upload covers, booklets and backs for all my classical CDs - not only for my own releases, but also for all the other CDs I own if they are missing on MB or have poor quality. After all, whatā€™s the point of hoarding them here on my hard drive, if others can also benefit from them?

6 Likes

My wish also!!
In highest possible resolution :muscle:

This sounds really good.

As for what you wrote next:
Iā€™m concerned.
My understanding is that any Cover Art that is of medium-fair quality or better is vastly superior to no cover art at all.
Maybe Iā€™m wrong though.
Iā€™d appreciate you trying to add a cover again and then asking for wider community input into the desirability of having the Cover Art you propose in the CAA (Cover Art Archive).
To be overly specific - please start a thread and ask for other editorsā€™ views.
It is conceivable that Iā€™d find your vision of Cover Art unfitting for the MB encyclopedia. Itā€™s equally conceivable that Iā€™d find it ā€œgood enoughā€. Or ā€œexcellentā€. Or maybe your un-cleaned images would be an excellent fit?
Iā€™d like to find out.

1 Like

Iā€™m pretty meticulous about adding cover art from my CDā€™s and vinyl when I add them to the database. However it is a time-consuming process. I can see why people donā€™t bother, because it slows down my data entry rate considerably.

2 Likes

@mmirG, this has already been discussed ad nauseum, and I personally donā€™t want to debate it all over again. If you want to see the discussion, you might want to check out the following threads:

Reconsidering archival CA scans (which you actually started and I was the only one that commented)

Advice on scanning cover art (which spawned another thread)

Uploading squared images to CAA (which made it abundantly clear that not having any cover art was preferred over having square cropped cover art)

Artwork Guidelines / Preferences (which raised the issue of ā€œpreferenceā€)

I find the whole matter rather tiresome, and am not in a rush to spend time scanning and uploading images only to have them voted down. Thatā€™s why Iā€™m currently only uploading images to support my edits.

5 Likes

With the risk of touching a touchy subjectā€¦

I following the unofficial guide here https://musicbrainz.org/doc/How_to_Scan_Cover_Art

Once. I did skip the section of touching up the image (as I might do with ancient family photosā€¦)

Resulting in this edit:
https://musicbrainz.org/edit/56801113

You can vote for it.

You can also vote for this edit: https://musicbrainz.org/edit/56801115

That one was made with: push button on scan device with auto settings 300dpi, save to jpg and do a very quick square crop with Irfanview. Save there at 95% jpg quality. (about 2-3 minutes of work).

My conclusion: please provide official documentation on ā€˜minimalā€™ scan and adjustment settings allowed.

And please please do not tell anybody to refrain from uploading art, as having art is better than having none. Having a near professional guide is really nice (if updated to the latest Gimp that really looks different) to have and great for the artwork lovers, but an official guide more people friendly that would help in reducing the number of releases without artwork would be nicer.

(Oh, and Iā€™m serious on the touchinessā€¦ please do not read this as a new rant type of posting).

4 Likes

Your scans look great.

FWIW, I prefer 300 dpi JPEGs to 600+ dpi PNGs. Using PNG for scans is simply a waste of space and bandwidth (which the Internet Archive has to pay for).

1 Like

Often, 300 dpi is not enough for all the details. Better do 600 dpi JPEG (high quality compression). For these parameters, I agree that the price for using PNG instead of JPEG is high for (almost?) no benefit.

For distinguishing different releases in the same release group, having original cover art cannot be valued too high.

The problem is the time it takes. But there is another option: Just take your digital camera (or even your smartphone) and make photos of all the important stuff (front, back, the discs, maybe the pages of the booklet) and upload those, without editing. Not too much effort. The only point is that all the important info (text, barcode, labels etc.) is readable. If someone else (or you) uploads better images later, the photos can be deleted. (but make sure that they really come from the the same release!)

2 Likes

Your albums must have better printing than almost any Iā€™ve seen! Few have any details above 300ppi, and many are far less. At least unless the details youā€™re looking to preserve are the halftone dot screen patterns (in which case, you need more like 1200ppi). Personally I do 300ppi mostly, but 600ppi when there is some extra detail to preserve (which oddly I see more on the CDs themselves than the booklets).

2 Likes

Your albums must have finer halftone dots than almost any that Iā€™ve seen!
I loosely remember a rare example someone had come up with where 600dpi had not been enough, but for the vast majority 600 dpi is well above the resolution of the dots. And this is exactly what I want: When I capture the image well above the dotting resolution, I can be sure that I capture all the details. Moreover, Iā€™m sure that the resolution is high enough that hq JPEG compression doesnā€™t hurt.

Maybe a clearer/stricter goal of the CAA would be helpful in decisions how to scan/upload/store.

The CoverArtArchive page only describes the goal of it as

to make cover art images available to everyone on the Internet in an organised and convenient way
Source: https://coverartarchive.org/

In that respect any scan quality/photo option would be allowed. Personally I would assume that readability would be a good minimal request for uploaders, but having added a lot of external source material myself I realize not all of that is really readable.
Is there anyone ā€˜in chargeā€™ of the caa who would like to elaborate on the goal of the archive? Is it there to reproduce images, to store for future use, or mere for informational value. The first case would warrant TIFF/PNG 1200/600 dpi scans not cropped (raw/unedited), the third option will leave the high quality ones for the people that really like putting work into it (and personally I think that is everybodyā€™s right).

See eg scans here: https://musicbrainz.org/release/941e7a1e-a0d8-38f4-91df-ea2cf1671657/cover-art
and the related (rough) discussion here: Edit #54502715 - MusicBrainz