Hi, everyone, I was referred to your site by a friend. I’ve recently scanned in about 1,400 CD releases from my personal collection (CD and all included artwork and inserts). I scanned the images on an Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner at 600dpi and saved the scans in .png format. I pieced larger posters and liner artwork together in Photoshop to properly represent the art in its original format.
They’re quite large in file size, but I thought others might be interested in having the full artwork for their CDs without the time-consuming process of scanning and editing the artwork themselves.
I’m not sure where to start, or if this is something this community would even want. I did not see anything in the user guide about just uploading artwork to existing releases. Please let me know if this is something the MusicBrainz community would be interested in or if I should look elsewhere to share this artwork.
Probably the most important thing is to make sure you are adding your artwork to the correct release. In general, any minor difference in artwork, including in the fine print, constitutes a unique release.
If there is already artwork in place, you only need to add yours if it is of significantly higher quality/resolution.
If you are replacing a lower-resolution image, feel free to enter an edit to remove the lower-resolution image.
I am just going in alphabetical order by artist to keep track of it, since I’ll just be uploading here and there as I have time (should hopefully have more time next year).
Before I get too deep, would you mind looking over my first two upload batches?
Question 1: for The Autumn Effect, it has two music labels which are both prominently featured on the spine and rear. There are two entries for the same barcode under each music label. Should I upload the artwork to both releases, or should these be merged into the one release that they are?
Question 2: When there is existing lower-resolution artwork, what is the policy there? I don’t feel comfortable removing another contributor’s work.
I will remove the low res covers after uploading the high res ones, (cover type has to be the same) Don’t forget to provide your reasoning for the removal when you do it!
Yeah, the archive.org server is really slow. I’ll do it here and there for the next few months. It took me nearly two years to re-rip all my CDs in FLAC and scan all the artwork in. I know patience.
Indeed, so basically once I upload the cover arts, I leave it alone and let the CAA servers and the voters do their thing during the 7-day voting period,
Note that the first one is a Digital Media release, rather than a CD. They should not be merged.
It’s quite normal to remove existing art if you are uploading a better-quality image. If you aren’t comfortable, leave it alone, it’s doing no harm. Someone else may come along and remove the lower-res images.
One thing, though, most applications that get cover art from MusicBrainz will take the first image with the “cover” type that they encounter for a release. So you want to move (at least) your cover image to the first position. You can do that while uploading by moving the ‘New Image Goes Here’ tile to the first position before you start the upload (all of your images will be placed before the old images).
You can do it after you upload by going to the Cover Art page and clicking on ‘Re-order cover art.’ Here you can move images around one at a time.
I just looked at the “13 & God” release. Square-cropped cover images should not be uploaded to a release that doesn’t have a square cover (digipaks, for example). I know a lot of apps square them up, so some want to put a square image on MB, but the guidelines say ‘Don’t.’
Something I do with my cover art that I scan is to do some smoothing, as without it the dots from scanning will be more noticeable when shrunken. In PSP, I use the Edge Preserving Smooth Tool: (just showing a quick example of a blank image)
If you are adding artwork to a popular release that has a lot of releases in the Release Group, be really fussy about that rear cover. Watch out for the tiny text changes on the rears. Examples are the “made in Italy” or similar that appears under a barcode. Or the little price codes that are scattered around that may change from CB681 to CB811. Watch out for a different manufacturer on the CD matrix. Or sometimes the actual printing on a CD may slightly change.
Some releases may be pressed for many years. Factories change. And little details shuffle around. Each little detail change is a new release.
Also worth checking the linked Discogs page.
If in doubt, clone the release and make a new one.
And thanks for sharing your arts. I’ve been really enjoying scanning mine as it has allowed me to really appreciate the booklets and the whole artwork. Before I started on my scanning mission I have never even touched many of the booklets.
@14Super60pa
So I had originally planned to scan everything in at 300 dpi. But I noticed that reducing from a 600 dpi scan (for my cover art) allowed the artwork to look crisp once it was reduced rather than artificially blurring/smoothing. My thought with uploading the .pngs (how I have them stored), is that people like me that want a higher resolution have it. People that want to reduce it (in size, or by converting to .jpg) still have that option (or can download the database-converted version), and also still have the option to blur/smooth it to eliminate the dot matrix if they want.
I do JPG at 85% which is still keep pretty sharp on this 4K monitor with a nice reduction in file size. I personally don’t want artwork taking up more space than the music files.
But what ever quality you now have, upload as that. Some people whack in 33MB PNGs. It is always easy for another user to downsize, but impossible to upsize.
