Hehe, thank you for responding @Freso. Just an observation when you say 2-3 topics pop up vs. the “plenty of discussions” leading to “we all have our own methods and tips often get shared” by @IvanDobsky.
So where are all of these “plenty of discussions”?
In any case, Freso, I sense a feeling of demand to cater to the acceleration of the new cover ticker moving on the front page.
Cover art is integral to identifying differences between editions; discussions to produce those better scans are likewise integral to the Cover Art Archive’s foundation.
Don’t you agree?
We need a consolidated home to feverishly produce the most ideal scans of editions and to work and research on how to best achieve the aim.
There are artwork addicts, or rather completionists, like me and IvanDobsky and who aerozol identifies as “people to join in who are just interested in cover art”; if our demographic had a separate (sub)category we would see our consolidated place of research leading to concerted and coordinated work.
Wow, what an explosion in beautiful and clearly scanned album art for the Cover Art Archive this would be!
Depends on your definition of “Plenty”. @Freso is correct, that there are not DAILY discussions. Barely even monthly. So we can tag it with cover-art and let the conversations be found. Don’t need a separate section. Those tags are pretty useful for linking discussions.
The key is have more discussions, tag it more, and the more cover-art conversations appear on the front page, the more people join in. And the more people join in, the bigger the discussions. And then that would logically show at a later time if a need was there for a section.
You will also find that I am not here “only for the cover art”. I am here for the data. I can be far more interested in researching that recording engineer and where else they turned up. I also will have a very different viewpoint on what is good artwork. I don’t believe in locking out the amateur. I have a combo of an old Brother MFP, NAPS2 and Paint.net. While you do a high-end description, I’ll kick in with the basics. I already can spend over an hour on scanning\editing a CD - when I’d rather spend that time on the database.
@aerozol - I also agree with you. Too often people wade in and slap a prettified image up for tagging. Would be good to have a thread to point them at that says why this is an evil thing to do and they need to understand a difference between a pretty image and a real image of a product. Warts and all.
I clicked one random cover art from their homepage.
I didn’t see any edition info (catalogue number, barcode), so I guess they only manage cover arts at generic opus (release group) level.
Which is very good for people just wanting a good looking cover art for an album, whatever the edition.
But at MB, we manage packaging images (not only front covers) at edition (release) level.
It’s why it’s important for us that the images are actually the edition, exactly, rather than good quality.
But it can also be good quality, of course
@dpr it is rare to find the exact cover on fanart.tv where typically only one cover per release is collected. http://albumartexchange.com/ is geoblocked by much of the world and like jesus2099 says they collect scans at the generic opus level.
The world is sorely missing a talented scanning community dedicated to filling scans for the edition level.
But they/we seem to happily beaver away in nerdy solitude. If you know of others and want to build more of a community feel, and a bigger community, then please do! Invite people over.
With or without it’s own cover art forum section, we are insanely blessed to have the Cover Art Archive - no image size or rate limit… It’s bananas. That plus the existing MB release-based database and I feel MB is perfectly set up already.
Edit: I use both fanart.tv and Album Art Exchange, they’re great, but the MB setup is way better. Sometimes people give the exact release source in AAE which is awesome, but not often enough unfortunately.
I guess I’ve been lucky so far with artwork frim various places inc albumartexchange, but not fanart.tv. I have almost got a good sized cover for everything that is correct and ok/decent quality. I agree that MB has a better setup for art with specific versions etc.
It would be good to be clearly define the aims and the why of MB.
The Cover Art Archive is a cooperation between the Internet Archive and MusicBrainz to form a repository of music cover art (e.g. the covers of CDs) that is freely and easily accessible.
Pretty simple and clear.
And now, should I upload modified images or images that don’t match actual releases?
These covers are being collected for archival purposes …
Ah ok, the answer is no. Archival purpose, for me, it means that it must look like the actual packaging, it must be the actual product, taken in picture.
Some of the booklets can be pretty important for getting correct credits. I at least try and get the couple of pages from the back that lists the engineers, etc.
Nothing worse than trying to peer at a 600pixel wide discogs booklet trying to work out someone’s name.
As to the help pages - there could be a more distinct bit making it clear “Accuracy first, tagging second”. And a linky to the fanart.tv\albumartexchange\TheAudioDB options that the taggers are really looking for. I get bored of having arguments with people uploading pretty squares.
I do love a good booklet! and I like to be able to browse through a booklet in order. The artwork section allows them to be ordered, but when I download them they are saved as their mbid.jpg or .png. Is there a way of keeping or discerning the order?
Are you going to CAA to download? In that case, I can’t answer. Don’t know how their maths work. (You also don’t get to see when an image is disabled on that page)
I use Picard and it picks them up in order. So Booklet.jpg, Booklet(1).jpg, etc.
I keep meaning to look at better naming. For example - skip Booklet.jpg and go start at Booklet(1).jpg first when there are multiple pages so it alpha sorts in the directory better.
Like you I also name the pages in comments, but I also add other description on other images so it would be hard to set a fixed rule.
I am here for the data. I can be far more interested in researching that recording engineer and where else they turned up. I also will have a very different viewpoint on what is good artwork. I don’t believe in locking out the amateur. I have a combo of an old 
