fanart.tv is an excellent source for artwork. Yate can download artwork in all fanart music categories.
The function is different from other artwork functions as it is based on MusicBrainz Ids as opposed to Album metadata. In order to use the functionality, Yate requires that tracks to be processed have MusicBrainz Release Ids. Any other MusicBrainz IDs that are required will be downloaded if necessary. Downloaded MusicBrainz IDs will be saved to the tracks regardless as to whether artwork gets downloaded. If you wish to load the required IDs when accessing MusicBrainz for a general data import, import the MusicBrainz Release Group URL and MusicBrainz Artist URLs. When extracting the artist URLs, this function honours the Settings-MusicBrainz-Use per track artist URLs setting. If your tracks are organized into album folders, it is fairly easy to extract missing MusicBrainz Release IDs from the AcoustID functionality. You can use action statements or via the UI:
In order to retrieve artwork from fanart.tv you must have a personal API key. The key can be acquired by registering at fanart.tv. You must then request a personal API key. Once you have the API key, paste it into the fanart.tv API Key field on the Settings-Artwork-Searches panel.
The \?fa escape sequence can be used to test if the API key has been saved. The sequence returns 1 for true and 0 for false.
If you are going to access artwork from this site you are strongly urged to contribute artwork as well.
All categories of fanart.tv artwork may be imported and with one exception you can specify that you want to import at most one item in a category or that you want to import all available items in a category. For any given track at most one CD artwork item, (which corresponds to a track's Disc number), will be imported. Note that in the case of Artist artwork categories, one means one per artist. You should understand that choosing an All option might result in a lot of artwork being downloaded.
The following table displays the Picture Types assigned to each artwork category.
| Artwork Category | Picture Type |
|---|---|
| Album cover | Cover (front) |
| Disc artwork | Media (CD label) |
| Artist image | Artist/performer |
| Artist background | During performance |
| Artist HD Logo | Band/artist logotype |
| Artist Logo | Band/artist logotype |
| Artist Banner | A bright coloured fish |
With the exception of error reporting, the function is silent. Testing the artwork count before and after execution is the only means of determining if anything was imported.
While this function is available in grouped execution mode, it is far more efficient when run stepwise. At all costs avoid doing individual applications of this function on tracks while grouped. When running stepwise no individual external access will be made more than once.
When the function completes, it will Normalize the artwork for the following artwork types: Cover (front), Other, Cover (back) and Media (CD label). Further if the resulting default image is of type Other, it will be changed to Cover (front).
Yate attempts to follow the MusicBrainz guidelines for rate limiting its requests. However, there are external causes outside of Yate's control which could cause a network response of Service Unavailable (503). When using this action statement in the Batch Processor, you can test for 503 errors by testing the numeric value of the MusicBrainz Unavailable named variable. A non zero value implies that 503 errors occurred.