[Goodies-dev] Audio thumbnailer

[Dirk Vanden Boer]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 12:58 AM, Erlend Davidson
<E.R.M.Davidson at sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> Quoting Christian Dywan <christian at twotoasts.de>:
>
>> Am Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:41:03 +0200
>> schrieb "Dirk Vanden Boer" <dirk.vdb at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> 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
>>
>> Hey Dirk,
>>
>> actually the cd case makes me think of *albums*, ie. folders, when I
>> see it. It takes me a second look on the filename to see that these are
>> music files.
>
> I agree.  I really like it though, as folder a thumbnail however.  I would
> prefer two options - one for the above album cover (folder) thumbnail, and
> another for individual tracks.  Perhaps something like the attached (rough)
> for music files...
>

I see your points. I will probably introduce a command line switch
which let's you choose between different presets. The cdcase will be
one of them. I already tried overlaying a music note, but the result
wasn't really satisfactory, maybe I made the note too small but I
didn't immediately recognize the files as audio files.

Other ideas are always welcome.

Cheers,
Dirk