Posts Tagged ‘Squeezecenter’

Extracting album art from iTunes

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 in Computing

My music collection is primarily played using SqueezeCenter. But, I also have iTunes available for syncing to my iPod which I use in the car. One thing iTunes does fairly well is fetching album artwork, and I’ve been looking for a way of getting this in to SqueezeCenter without embedding the images in the MP3 files.

I found this script (there’s a download link towards the bottom) which does this job perfectly. It runs through my library and saves out all the iTunes artwork in a single file per album called cover.jpg. It’s written in javascript, so it’s not at all pretty. You just run it and wait until the dialogue appears saying it’s finished.

One gotcha I found was that I had to do a complete rescan of SqueezeCenter to make it notice that the album artwork had appeared. It was sporadic before that. Caching maybe?

That’s one problem I can tick off with a nice easy solution. :-)

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FreeBSD stuff

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 in Computing, FreeBSD

I’ve done a bit of work on my FreeBSD ports lately. Firstly, after building my new server, I got round to upgrading from SlimServer to SqueezeCenter. This also meant sorting out ports for all the plugins I use. This didn’t take too long, and you can find them all over here. So far I’m liking SqueezeCenter, and I’d highly recommend it (and a SqueezeBox, of course).

I also maintain a port for a suite of software called KRoC. KRoC is written and maintained where I work, so apart from making it available to FreeBSD users I also have an interest in supporting the work done by our department. I’ve been waiting some time for a 1.5.x release of KRoC, but I finally got impatient. I automated the production of snapshots from their stable branch, and updated the port to build from that. I also run a FreeBSD 7 machine in their buildbot system to further test KRoC on my favourite operating system :-)

And in other FreeBSD news, I cast my vote in the FreeBSD Core elections. It’s hard to know who to vote for, but I gave their statements a good read and made a decision. Good luck to them all!

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