Today, I completed a project that has been an off and on effort for a very long time. Finally, I have all of my ripped music with high-quality cover artwork. My definition of high quality starts at 950px, but the ones that I have been augmenting myself are 1500px. This began many years ago, judging by past blog posts, about 6 years ago. My first thought was scanning ALL of my CDs. That was overly ambitious to say the least. Then the plan was to scan only the MCA Master Series so I could print them and hang them on the wall as art. That was doable and was completed. Then the plan became to only scan the covers which had no suitable online version.
And that is what took me years to complete, just because it became somewhat low priority. If I had artwork at all, that’s pretty good. But when I started using Plex regularly, I really noticed when my artwork was subpar. The cover would be all fuzzy and pixelated on my large TV where I was viewing Plex. So that sort of got me motivated.
The biggest problem was identifying which albums had poor album art. And for that, I wrote a utility that would scan my Plex database and read all the covers and get their measurements, then create an export file that I could filter and sort to what I needed. And over time, the list of low-res covers shrank, to the point where I am today.
And while I was creating these better quality scans, I continued to upload them to my Flickr page for anyone to download, but I doubt anyone really finds them there. So along the way, I tried to find a more popular website where I could share my work. Fanart.tv seemed to be promising, and I did get some covers approved there, but I ran into a problem with moderators that were either too picky, or didn’t recognize the original artwork and dismissed it as incorrect. And as I had read in their usage guidelines, you are not to argue with a moderator, just do what they say. I chose to leave, instead. I’ve had such trouble finding a community that I can participate in.
Despite that trouble, I’m still pleased with myself. I’m not one to need a lot of recognition or praise, I just want to contribute.
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