Album art for Squeezebox
September 14, 2010 in album art by Dan Gravell
The Logitech Squeezebox range of music players offer music networked around your home for a reasonable price. The Squeezebox Touch and Squeezebox Radio offer colour, high resolution displays on which you can enjoy your music's album art. So to enjoy your Squeezebox to the full, you need album art.
Gathering album art can take a long time. Squeezebox users tend to have large music collections, so finding and installing art for the entire collection can take a long time. If you want to download album cover art I would recommend these sources for finding the art and then reading the Squeezebox rules for album art. Armed with a music tagger or even just a file explorer you can do-it-yourself. Just don't expect it to be quick!
bliss provides an automatic alternative. This saves you a lot of time, especially when your music is in the thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of tracks. Very soon, your Squeezebox can look as beautiful as intended.
How do you use bliss to complete your Squeezebox's album artwork? There are three steps:
- Define the rules for your album art.
Set the co-located file to be 'cover', in accordance with Squeezebox album art rules. It's also worth embedding the album art. - Apply the album art rule.
This starts bliss whipping your music library into shape, according to your rules. bliss won't replace any existing art. You can also change the art afterwards, if you like. - Rescan your Squeezebox Server. Read the instructions here. If you only stored a cover.jpg file (you didn't embed artwork), you must perform Clear library and rescan everything.
It's not just the initial workflow where bliss is useful. bliss runs as a background process and automatically sees new music added to your collection, and adds album art as above. If you run Squeezebox Server on a dedicated home server bliss works well installed on the same server. This way you have fully automated album art whenever you add new music to your collection. So not only is your Squeezebox beautiful now, it'll stay beautiful!
Enjoy your Squeezebox!
