Quarantine has been interesting but not at all boring for me. I've been giving myself daily projects whether digital or analog (real life) so here was a fun digital one.
The Problem
Managing the album art in my music collection was a hassle. The path format of
my music library is ~/Music/Artist/Album with each Album directory
containing both the actual MP3 files and a Folder.jpg file containing the
album art. For the sake of uniformity I kept my album art to 500x500 pixel
dimensions. Where all of this became a nuisance was in transferring music to
my phone (yeah, in 2020 I still listen to music from files and not entirely
streaming services) the Google Photos app would lose its mind asking if I
wanted to sync all of these Folder.jpg files.
The Solution
I weighed the pros and cons of writing a small piece of software in Ruby to
automate what I thought would be at least a decent sized undertaking. In the
process of looking into this I found a simple and elegant solution: an awesome
Ruby gem called fancy_audio. Installing this is a simple matter of
gem install fancy_audio from the command line.
Given that my music library is already in a clean and simple format (which I
manage using Beets but that's a whole other topic), I wrote a simple Bash
script that iterated over all the directories containing both MP3 files and a
Folder.jpg file then executed fancy_audio --all Folder.jpg, embedding the
Folder.jpg into each MP3 file for each album directory.
The End?
I haven't blogged in years and this may be both the first and last post I write here so we'll see how this goes.
Bye?