Automatic album art management with bliss

October 27, 2009 in album art by Dan Gravell

bliss is almost ready for release. Our intrepid beta testers and I have been throwing it all at bliss over the past few weeks. We've found some bugs and also the time to add some extra features.

I thought it was a good time to show you how bliss automatically manages album art for my music collection

I want my music collection to contain album art. I want it all embedded in the music files, and I want it all saved in a file prefixed 'cover' (this is a Squeezebox thing). I don't care about the size of the art, but I'd rather have something.

All these requirements are defined in bliss's cover art 'rule'. Here's how it looks:

Now I click 'Apply', and away goes bliss! bliss finds existing art in the library and makes sure it is embedded. Sometimes there is no art, but it finds cover art automatically (by downloading album cover art from the Web) and then embeds it...

Some it isn't sure about, because either the tag doesn't describe the album properly or it's a rare recording, so bliss asks me...

And it's done! That took a fraction of the time it used to take. No searching through Google or Amazon. No using a tag editor to embed the image I found in each file. All automatic.

The best bit? If I change how I want my album art stored I just change the rule and let bliss do all the work!

Reminds me of a song...