With AlbumArtExchange’s policy of blocking entire countries from using its database, fanart.tv has been touted by some as a viable alternative to AlbumArtExchange for album covers.
We have some very different goals from AlbumArtExchange though, they allow the same image at different resolutions, whereas we believe this is wasteful and only allow high quality images at a single high resolution of 1000 x 1000px.
As well as a single image size, all our images go through a moderation process to ensure only the highest quality images are available, so while we might not have the sheer quantity, we believe we can’t be beat on quality.
So are we a viable alternative to AlbumArtExchange? It’s a hard question to answer, if you are a country that is blocked by AlbumArtExchange, or are after covers by popular artists, then yes, absolutely.
If you are after covers by more obscure artists, then the answer is probably not quite yet, we simply don’t have the same quantity of contributors at this moment in time, hopefully this will change as we continue to grow.
Another feature that sets us apart is our open access to the database. Whereas AAE is very restrictive with use of its database we want everyone to get the most joy out of their collection as possible, our API gets over 120 million hits and transfers over 13TB of data a month.
We firmly believe that fan engagement is important for artists to maximize their revenue, to that end we try to make their content look as good as possible on the consumer’s device, ensuring fans can buy their albums safe in the knowledge that they will look great.
Cool, I wonder what country’s are blocking them.
fanart is better. I’m really dissapointed by AlbumArtExchange’s policy of blocking my country. I was a contributor too, so I felt that they have no respect for active users.
Fanart.tv seems to be used by a lot of third party applications. In fact, it all integrates so well that I didn’t know this until recently!
However, now that I do, it did not take me very long to decide to support Fanart.tv by subscribing as a VIP. Thanks to all the artists who contribute their art.
“high resolution of 1000 x 1000px”
I disagree and wouldn’t go around calling that “high resolution”.
I think this will hurt you guys down the track as display technologies advance.
But on the whole, fanart.tv is doing a lot of things right (as summarised above) and is far superior to AlbumArtExchange’s image dumping ground.
1000×1000 is more than you can get out of most CD covers. I agree that bigger is better in the days of full HD and larger cellphone screens, but one would have to scan vinyl covers for that – which is exactly where AAE’s strong point is. A lot of their members do just that, which is why they often have the best version on the web.
I’m perfectly with you that you are doing a moderated quality control here.
It’s a lot of work (respect!) and good for sorting out the rubbish you find a lot at albumartexchange.
But like you said it makes it difficult to close the gaps. I have a lot covers in 600×600 or backdrops that are grainy etc.
Why? Because I prefer to have a low quality image over having none for the artist, album etc.
And sometimes the contents of the images is just worth it so I go with lower quality.
So besides your better accesibility you are doing something great by sorting the incoming stuff.
But the perfect thing would be to allow two classes of pictures. You could give them the a HQ or LQ flag.
Everybody scraping later would get by default only the HQ so you can keep your reputation but the scraper settings would allow for
– HQ only
– LQ allowed if no HQ exists
– gimme all your stuff
So everybody could decide for what quality level he goes for.
If this is to difficult to manage or technically to programm for the scrapers .. ok .. but please keep it in mind if you think it might become possible.
By the way by LQ I don’t mean you should accept 300×300 pics. All pictures should be same size (upscaled if neccessary) so technically they have the same size to make it easier to use them later.
Everybody uploading should still look for clean edges. No text inside the picture etc.
These rules are necessary and great you check them!
But a lot of images you just don’t find in a better quality before you crop and prepare them for your media center.
I like a lot older music. Pictures of the 50s 60s are most of the time are grainy and I’m just happy if I find something at all.
Another reason I keep LQ images is for musicians when I can see them playing live in action.
The live situation showing the stage presence of an artist captures (depending on the musician) much better what music is about in contrast to HQ images which can be nice looking but steril.
Has anybody found a good backdrop image for the sugarcubes (Bjork’s old band)?
It’s just another tough nut to crack.. 🙂
I don’t see any reason to have lower quality images here. There are plenty of other sites for that.
If there’s no good quality image for a cover you need, you should consider making one yourself. Most scans you can find on the web are crap, anyway. They usually have some kind of moire that is hard to get rid off. Just make a 600dpi scan and you can properly descreen it.
Just copying and pasting other peoples scans isn’t gonna bring us forward all that much. If we want the best covers here, we need to create the best source images we can first.
Hey! After making that joke and giving up on the sugarcubes some years ago..
You got something on fanart.tv! Thank god for fanart.tv! 🙂
Really fanart is far better than albumartexchange. They are uploading different resolution covers with different quality, but fanart allows only one good quality (perfect square).
AAE insists on standard sizing, but they do allow non-square album art because there are non square covers (like digipacks). Makes sense to me. The site is moderated as well to ensure the quality is good, but the standards are different from fanart’s of course.
There is a lot of low quality art on either site. Art on fanart tends to be overprocessed more often. I see a lot of stuff with blown out shadows and highlights here. Heavy handed denoising is starting to become a problem. Personally I prefer underprocessed images. Gotta have something to work with. 🙂
The good thing about AAE is that they have a large community of people who actually scan covers and are doing fairly well at processing them. It’s not as if that doesn’t happen on fanart as well, but I think I see a larger percentage of covers from web sources here. Certain users do hardly anything but collecting images on AAE, tweaking them (rarely for the better) and uploading their versions here.
If fanart has collecting covers from AAE, which is also useful for those who can’t access AAE.You can see a lot of cdArts here, those who scans cdArts definitely scans album covers.Definitely most of the covers are from web sources, but those are retouched and edited before posting them.Most of the covers are in good quality. Some of them has scan moire pattern, blurry, compression artifacts and dust elements, those can be replaced when HQ is available.Fanart has superior and rich browsing interface.All you need is good quality artworks, no matter where it comes from.
First off, Fanart is not far better than AAE. (Btw, no one on AAE is paying me to say that.) All things being equal, both have their merits. As for Fanart being “…useful for those who can’t access AAE.” If I’m interpreting what you said correctly in so far as the overall context, try telling that to the contributors and head honchos on that site and report back to us what sort of response(s) you get. I’m quite sure no one over there (and over here for that matter) looks highly upon all this swapping going on.
As an aside I stated it very briefly within one post in that now infamous thread over in the Forum section, and will elaborate a bit here in this post. As a rule I don’t bother too much with AAE because most of the time one can find the same exact images online (e.g., Google, iTunes, etc.) Now if one wants to be a lazy s.o.b. and grab images from there and vice-versa without a bit of blood, sweat, and tears, I’m not exactly going to hold a gun to your head. All the same you’re still a lazy s.o.b., and dare I say bringing down one or several notches the respectability of each site. Granted, there are probably a host of reasons for pilfering images from one site or the other (e.g., September’s ‘Cry For You’ which I could no longer fine a suitable 1500×1500 online, and downloaded the solo one of Petra Marklund on AAX and downloaded another one from Google with the album title and combined them both). But I hasted to add it should only be as a last resort and not habitually.
Lastly, I agree with mostly everything ZincRider. He’s a got a good pulse on things, and I can back him up because I, too, have observed more or less the same thing.
You can download September’s Cry for You (1500X1500) from Canadian iTunes store.
Though I had in mind the album version and not the various singles of ‘Cry For You’, I had already known for many months that the Canadian store had certain 1500px scans of September’s discography. In one or two cases iTunes Canada was the only store that had them compared to the others worldwide. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really use any of their images with the exception of 2 or 3. Most of the images of September (a.k.a. Petra Marklund for those unfamiliar with her) that I put up here recently are from better sources. Thank you all the same!
Speaking of iTunes, they are quite a hit or miss. Despite that it’s good to know they are one of several sources one can go to, and hopefully come away with more ‘hits’ than ‘misses.’
The image in the title indeed symbolizes AAX extremely well. That site has a confusing policy. On one hand, they invite users to engage with them via social media, and have recently begun watermarking their images for unregistered users with their name. On the other hand, they put wide sweeping bans in effect. When I could still access the resource, they invited people to sign up, but signups were actually disabled at the time. Go figure. I wonder if they are related to filmtracks.com, who put a pompous ban in place at about the same time… Rant over.
I found Fanart through Google, and have used artwork from your fine site many times. 1000 pixels is indeed high quality, and near the top end to what I would use as a the default picture for an album. 1 megabyte is the absolute top limit. Images larger than that slow down browsing of a media library, use more memory and network latency. I do collect high-definition artwork, if availabe, mostly form Vinyl scans, but put that in a subdirectory, where it can be viewed on demand. I also always choose square artwork, even if that means slight over-cropping without cutting off important parts.
I do also find that most artwork here tends to be overprocessed, “digitally remastered”, either because a single artist with a certain flawed vision is working on it, or – I hope not – it is dictated by your rules. Common artifacts are obvious noise reduction on parts of the image, blurring, clipping of shadows or highlights when they were not nearly black or white in the original, and halos from sharpening or resizing with cubic/lanczos filters. That looks extremely ugly on captions, but often okay on photographic sections.
I think that strict enforecement of 1000 pixels serves little useful purpose. If the source image is near that size, let’s say 952 or 1417 pixels, as is quite common, little is gained from resampling it. Quality is instead lost from scaling (blur or halos) and re-encoding (banding, blocking). The layout of everyone’s media library is different. You can’t count on the artwork display box being this size or an integral multiple of it. In my collection, I go with a “preview quality” 600-1000 (1420 for plain art) pixels, and “high” definition with anything greater.
Digital artwork of modern day releases should be archived as is without rescaling. It is usually available within a year of an album’s publication, but is difficult to find later, as most versions on the open web are transcoded or “minified” automatically.
MusicBrainz is another good site for artwork. I sometimes contribute to it, if I can find a matching edition.
I was a contributor on AAX for several years, when the country block was set up I contacted the website admin directly hoping he would allow me to use the website again, but he never answered despite seeing my message.Fanart is a great website and convenient alternative to AAX, but the 1000×1000 requirement is a bit limiting considering a lot of old music covers only exist digitally in smaller resolutions (600×600 and up).
One suggestion I had was allowing users to add entries from official websites other than MusicBrainz, namely Discogs and iTunes since they are highly accurate and up to date. This would help speed up the addition process significantly.