[Goodies-dev] Audio thumbnailer

[Erlend Davidson]

Dirk Vanden Boer wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 3:07 PM, Dirk Vanden Boer <dirk.vdb at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> All the music downloaded from iTunes contains cover art, otherwise the
>> ipod won't show a picture when playing the audio, but players like
>> amarok, muine also support it, and I do it for all my music :-)
>>     
What audio formats use id3v2?  I thought it was just mp3.

It's quite an interesting idea, and I hope folder thumbnails are made 
possible in Thunar in the future, since this would be quite a good way 
of representing a music album folder.

I think iTunes only embeds the cover art if you actually drag the image 
when the track is playing.  When you download music from iTunes it is 
placed in some subdirectory - I think?  Also some media players call the 
album cover "folder.jpg" and put it in the same directory as the music.  
It might be useful to hook into these to extract the thumbnails too... 
only problem is that the iTunes album art might be licenced, so it could 
be breaking the law to use that (anybody know?).

There is another issue that replacing the theme music icon my an image 
could be confusing to users.  I've already discussed this with Benny for 
PDFs - having thumbnails for *everything* makes it more difficult to 
determine filetypes, unless there is some emblem of the thumbnail to 
indicate the type.
>>     
>>>>  The thumbnailer is written in c++
>>>> and consists of three sourcefiles, I think it's a bit overkill to
>>>> create a seperate project for this like I did with ffmpegthumbnailer.
>>>> So I was wondering if it can be included in the thunar-thumbnailers
>>>> code archive?
>>>>         
>>> Currently there is no binary code in Thunar-thumbnailers.  When I need
>>> to write a binary to do something I have created (or used) an external
>>> project - for example raw-thumbnailer (which is less than 100 lines of
>>> code) and your ffmpegthumbnailer.  In a sense Thunar-thumbnailers is
>>> just a set of rules for generating thumbnails.
>>>       
>> I understand, so it's probably better to just create an new project on
>> google code.
>>     
>>> Can you post the thumbnailer to this list please?
>>>       
>> Attached is the file containing the modifications I made to
>> thunar-thumbnailers. The configuration stuff isn't perfect yet (make
>> install doesn't correctly install it yet I think, I had to do some
>> manual tweaking) but it should allow you to build the thumbnailer.
>> Dependencies are Taglib and Imagemagick.
The only disadvantage to having it as a separate project is that it 
gives distribution maintainers more packages to maintain, and sometimes 
they (Debian, and as a result Ubuntu) won't add something for ages.  I 
still feel it's the best thing to do though (harping back to the Unix 
philosophy that one program does one thing).

Erlend