I was cleaning up my music collection yesterday by using Discogs (opens new window), a great online Discography catalogue website, to download missing album cover art. I normally use the long-windedly named Album Cover Art Downloader (opens new window) to download cover art, as it's pretty good and can grab images from various sources (amazon.com, yahoo, buy.com) - but there are some albums, especially bootlegs and the like, that aren't on Amazon. While using Discogs I saw that they have artist images (such as the one on the right), and started to download these to use like Album Art images, by naming the file folder.jpg and placing it in the artist's folder (My music collection is organised by First Letter\Artist\Album, e.g. A\Aphex Twin\Hangable Autobulb).

Of course, I quickly realised that this would take a while to complete, so I searched for any software which took advantage of the Discogs catalogue. Although Wikipedia's page on Discogs (opens new window) had a list of software (opens new window) which uses the Discogs catalog , there wasn't any cover art downloading software listed. After a search on google, I found a slightly shorter named piece of software called Album Art Downloader (opens new window) on Sourceforge. This new piece of software does a similar job to Album Cover Art Downloader, but has a lot more plugins to search different sites for album art - including Discogs.

So, after adding a list item for Album Art Downloader to the Wikipedia page, I downloaded installed the software. The Discogs plugin is capable of downloading album art images, which is great, but doesn't download artist images. As Album Art Downloader uses a plugin architecture, I figured it wouldn't be too hard to hack the existing Discogs script to use it for artist images. The existing plugin is at C:\Program Files\AlbumArtDownloader\Scripts\discogs.boo, and it consists of the following code:

namespace CoverSources
import System
import System.Text
import System.Text.RegularExpressions
import util

class Discogs:
 static SourceName as string:
  get: return "Discogs"
 static SourceCreator as string:
  get: return "Alex Vallat"
 static SourceVersion as string:
  get: return "0.4"
 static def GetThumbs(coverart,artist,album):
  query as string = artist + " " + album
  query.Replace(' ','+')
  obidResults = GetPage(String.Format("http://www.discogs.com/search?type=all&q={0}", EncodeUrl(query)))

  //Get obids
  obidRegex = Regex("<a href="http://www.blogger.com/" obid="" release="">\\d+)\"&gt;]+&gt;(?:&lt;/?em&gt;|(?<name>[^&lt;]+))+</name>", RegexOptions.Multiline)
  obidMatches = obidRegex.Matches(obidResults)
  coverart.EstimatedCount = obidMatches.Count //Probably more than this, as some releases might have multiple images

  for obidMatch as Match in obidMatches:
   //Construct the release name by joining up all the captures of the "name" group
   releaseNameBuilder = StringBuilder()
   for namePart in obidMatch.Groups["name"].Captures:
    releaseNameBuilder.Append(namePart)

   releaseName = releaseNameBuilder.ToString()

   //Get the image results
   imageResults = GetPage(String.Format("http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?what=R&amp;obid={0}&amp;showpending=1", obidMatch.Groups["obid"].Value))

   imageRegex = Regex("<img src="\" url="" />http://www\\.discogs\\.com/image/R-\\d+-\\d+.(?:jpe?g|gif|png))\" width=\"(?<width>\\d+)\" height=\"(?<height>\\d+)\"")
   imageMatches = imageRegex.Matches(imageResults)

   coverart.EstimatedCount += imageMatches.Count - 1 //Adjust count by how many images for this release

   for imageMatch as Match in imageMatches:
    coverart.Add(imageMatch.Groups["url"].Value, releaseName, Int32.Parse(imageMatch.Groups["width"].Value), Int32.Parse(imageMatch.Groups["height"].Value), null)

 static def GetResult(param):
  return param

Well, I figured it wouldn't be too hard to make a copy of this and edit it to download artist images. The main changes need to be to change the Class name (to DiscogsArtist), change the plugin details, make the first search look for artists only (change query as string = artist + " " + album to query as string = album), remove the extra code between the artist/album search and the image search and change the RegEx search for images within the page to search for files beginning with A- (Artist) instead of R- (Release).

What we come up with is the following script:

namespace CoverSources
import System
import System.Text
import System.Text.RegularExpressions
import util

class DiscogsArtist:
 static SourceName as string:
  get: return "Discogs Artist"
 static SourceCreator as string:
  get: return Mark Honeychurch
 static SourceVersion as string:
  get: return "0.1"
 static def GetThumbs(coverart,artist,album):
  query as string = album
  query.Replace(' ','+')

  //Get the image results
  imageResults = GetPage(String.Format("http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?artist={0}", EncodeUrl(query)))

  imageRegex = Regex("<img src="\" url="" />http://www\\.discogs\\.com/image/A-\\d+-\\d+.(?:jpe?g|gif|png))\" width=\"(?<width>\\d+)\" height=\"(?<height>\\d+)\"")
  imageMatches = imageRegex.Matches(imageResults)

  coverart.EstimatedCount += imageMatches.Count - 1 //Adjust count by how many images for this release

  for imageMatch as Match in imageMatches:
   coverart.Add(imageMatch.Groups["url"].Value, artist, Int32.Parse(imageMatch.Groups["width"].Value), Int32.Parse(imageMatch.Groups["height"].Value), null)

 static def GetResult(param):
  return param

I saved this as discogartists.boo and copied it to the plugins directory. When I first started up Album Art Downloader, I received complaints about indenting - as it turns out that indenting is used to mark loops and the like in the plugin. After fixing the indenting, Album Art Downloader ran without any complaints - woo hoo!

Using the plugin is a bit of a fudge! First, to make sure each artist's folder shows up we need to have at least one file in each of them. My quick fix was to browse through each of the folders containing artists in turn, turning on the Thumbnails view. This causes windows to create a Thumbs.db file in each artist's folder.

Run Album Art Downloader, and then ensure that only the Discogs Artists plugin is selected in the Sources: box on the right. Next click on File, New, File Browser. In the browser window, first click on the Options... to expand the Options panel, then ensure the Include subfolders when searching for audio files tickbox is checked and select the Use file path pattern matching: radio button. Click the Search button in the top-right of the window, and then once the search has completed click the Artist column header to organise the results by Artist name. Now look for all the results grouped together with the parent folder (in my case, A-Z) name as the Artist name. Tick each of the boxes and then click on the Get Artwork for Selection... button in the bottom-right of the window. Now for each window that pops up, select the image you'd like (left-click on the image to see a full size version) and click the floppy disc button to save the file to your artist's folder as folder.jpg.