[kde-doc-english] JuK Cover Management documentation

[Michael Pyne]

As suggested by Philip Rodrigues, I've gone ahead and compiled some of the new 
features from the JuK Cover Manager that will be in KDE 3.5, which I have 
recently blogged about.

My non-marked-up version is attached.  If anyone has questions or needs 
clarifications, please let me know.  Also please CC: me, as I'm not 
subscribed.

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne
-------------- next part --------------
NOTE: I've tried to use __foo__ to mean underline and //foo\\ to mean emphasizing to make markup easier.

-Cover Management with JuK 2.3:

JuK 2.3 (part of KDE 3.5) includes improved cover management code with introduces some new possibilities for users compared with JuK 2.2 (which was shipped with KDE 3.4).  It also can change the workflow slightly for you if you are used to the way covers were handled in JuK 2.2.  So first, let's review how things used to be.

-How Covers worked in JuK 2.2:

In JuK 2.2, the cover for a track was strictly tied to its Artist and Album information. Although this proved useful enough, and had a few advantages, it wasn't a great way to organize the covers. If you wanted to use a cover for a different track, you either had to rename the tags in the track, or you had to duplicate the cover, wasting hard disk space. And if your track had no Artist or Album information, JuK would prevent you from setting a cover since it had no information to go by. It worked, but it could be better.

-How Covers work in JuK 2.3:

In JuK 2.3, the code was redesigned to add a core component responsible for dealing with cover art.  Instead of looking on disk for a picture file with a specific name like JuK 2.2, the Cover Manager in JuK 2.3 associates every cover with an identification tag, and then uses the tag with your music.  It's still not perfect, but it works, and it can save you time while allowing you to do more.

-Examples of adding covers:

So just as an example, let's say you wanted to set a cover for tracks you just ripped off of your CD. We'll use __Alabama - Greatest Hits III__ for the sake of discussion. In JuK 2.2, you could simply select any one of those tracks, and import a cover from the Internet by right-clicking on that track, and using the Cover Manager -> Get Cover From Internet command. As a side effect of the way JuK worked, the cover would then be immediately applied to *all* of the __Alabama - Greatest Hits III__ tracks, //whether you wanted that or not\\.

In JuK 2.3, the procedure is exactly the same, with one exception: You should select all of the tracks you want to apply the cover to first. So you would select all the __Alabama - Greatest Hits III__ tracks before using the Get Cover From Internet command. Or if you only wanted to set cover art to half of the tracks for some reason, you'd only select half the tracks before running the Get Cover From Internet command. Don't worry about duplicating covers, either: JuK is smart enough to re-use the same image, so you won't get 14 duplicate .png images cluttering your hard drive.

-Reusing old covers:

But what happens if you forgot to select all the tracks you wanted to tag? You could select them and repeat the process, but that would leave a duplicate cover on your hard drive because JuK can't quickly tell that the cover you've found is the same as one you already have. But that's alright, because you can tell JuK to use the cover from another track.

There are two ways of doing this:

1. Open the Cover Manager dialog using the Tagger menu (Tagger -> Cover Manager > Show Cover Manager). The Cover Manager will display a list of all the covers JuK knows about on the right, and after they have loaded you can quickly pare the list down using the search line at the top, or by using the list of Artists on the left. Once you see the cover you want to use, you can drag-and-drop the cover onto a track to apply it. It should happen nearly instantaneously since JuK is reusing the same cover (and you'll see the cover while you're dragging it as well). Unfortunately, it can take awhile to load the covers in the first place, and the Cover Manager isn't really useful for much else besides.

2. I prefer to use this method because it's rather easy. All you do is double-click on the track that has the cover you want, in order to start it playing. This will cause its cover to show up in the Now Playing bar, and you can drag-and-drop the cover to the track you want to change exactly as you would for the Cover Manager.

-Dragging covers to more than one track at once:

Also note that you can use drag-and-drop to quickly apply covers to more than one track. Just select the tracks you want to apply a cover to, and drag the cover onto any one of the selected tracks.

-What happens to my old covers?

You may be wondering what JuK will do if you already have covers from JuK 2.2.  What happens is that JuK will automatically convert the old covers and merge them into the cover management system.

Because this is a time consuming process, it does not happen all at once.  Instead, the old cover is only converted when the cover needs to be shown on screen.  As the conversion process is happening, JuK will recognize what tracks would have shown the cover being converted, and will automatically apply the new cover to those tracks.  The end result is that there should be no visible changes: JuK will keep the same cover on your tracks that they've always had, except that now you can immediately take advantage of the new cover management features.

-Removing covers:

Another side effect is that you can now remove a cover from a track without simultaneously removing it from all other tracks with the same Artist and Album.

In JuK 2.3, the Remove Cover command now only removes the covers from the selected tracks.

-Suggested uses:

1. You can now apply the same cover to tracks with Albums that have (Disc 1), (Disc 2), etc, which you couldn't do in JuK 2.2 without duplicating the cover.

2. Applying a "generic" cover to tracks if you simply must have a cover on every track, or if you have music that wasn't released as an album but fits a genre well.  You could make yourself a cover for that type of music and apply it to the songs in question.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-doc-english/attachments/20051008/8ca403d4/attachment.sig