So I’ve been playing around with a few things now.
Using Thumbgen Designer I altered a DeVicious TV Season episode template. Hacked, fenaggled, and beat info submission really… which only reflects my level of understanding prior…
Once satisfied (for now) I used Thumbgen. in options/advanced, I told it to include mp3 flac ogg etc… so it would pick them up, and because it was a TV Season template, it only picks the first album under each artist. There were problems with double albums… there’s always some problems…
When TG can’t find your album name on the TVDB, you have to manually type “lost” for example into the search field so it pulls up a metadata file with all the fields necessary. Then it is a case of c/p info from a few different sources to come up with this —>
Who knew Connie Francis was hot? The blue text will be removed from the xml once I am finished. The time/temp, the song title, and the album art is the xml, and the rest is the linksheet.
Pics I find on Google images, using gimp to resize and export to a folder. “Name” + wallpaper in the search is often helpful, but not always.
Dropped the album names into the “episode name” field from an excel sheet made using … cmd> dir > txt then import to excel.
Band members and bios from AllMusic.com get dropped into “cast” and “overview” (not sure if I like bios or not, but I’ll leave them there for now)
I have a notepad window open to adjust text for band members and album names. You need to add commas…
Keyboard shortcuts rock for this. Ctrl + A C V, home, del, are invaluable time savers. As well as Ctrl/shift/e in jing…
Generate your jpgs, strip the extension as you would normally.
The artist name in the tag has to exactly match the name as the jpg created (folder name), because the xml cues off of the artist, and therefore the linksheet does too. Important enough to note as several needed to be tweaked after because of & instead of “and” , stupid spelling errors etc…
I set TG to create a metadata file for each that lives in the first album for each artist, so if I want to change things later, all the information is there - don’t want to do this ever again.
Am I nuts. Probably. It’s a labor of love, and you just grind away at it.
It is helpful to separate it into different steps.
I made all my spreadsheets first because you then can c/p info from them multiple times in different steps. Then I make all the pngs for a A or B or C next, and then I pick away 10 at a time. I’ve now got it down to about 5-8 min total per sheet.
I have the letter C completed, and all linksheets are working fine, another 300 or so since I started. I don’t anticipate problems with capacity.
If any of you want to play around with the template, here’s a link to a download. Just place it in the templates folder of TG as you would any other. It’s not cleaned up, I just made it work.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/vz8vvsmjtmna5cl/Artist_Template_by_Menisantic.zip
Once I get along a little farther, I’ll upload the sheets along with the tgmd files. Dunno if I’m the only one doing this or not, or if anyone is interested in the first place.
The end results are worth it if you ask me.
