[Goodies-dev] Audio thumbnailer

[Dirk Vanden Boer]

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 7:26 PM, Dirk Vanden Boer <dirk.vdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 6:20 PM, Erlend Davidson
> <E.R.M.Davidson at sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>>
>> 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.
>
> Aac also supports it, but tag lib can also read tags from ogg, mpc,...
> files. So these can be added later.
>
>> 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?).
>
> I have no idea about that. Your only using for a thumbnail, seems
> pretty harmless.
>
>> 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.
>
> I have been thinking about this as well, Overlaying a music note
> picture might be a good idea here.
>
>>>>
>>>>>>  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).
>
> Since the thumbnailer is optional they can still package it withouth
> it being enabled, at least
> the people who really want to use it can build it from source.

I added an option to put the cover image on a cdcase which should make
it more clear that the thumbnail is for an audio file and not an
image.
I made a screenshot which will explain it better :-)
http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg184/dirk_vdb/audiothumbnailer.png

Dirk