[mb-users] additional CoverArt AR necessary?

[Johannes Dewender]

Okay, just a quick note how this started out:

<introduction>
When adding a Creative Commons AR for a Jamendo album the MusicBrainz 
server automatically finds CoverArt and displays it. Seeing that I 
changed the annotation of the Label Jamendo saying that adding a 
CoverArt AR is unnecessary then.
There was disagreement. First because the Picard coverart plugin needed 
the CA AR and then a general semantic discussion.
A link to this change is here:
http://musicbrainz.org/show/edit/?editid=8598722
(you also find a link to the Jamendo Label there)

The discussion went on to
http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/ticket/3189
where a small fix of the coverart plugin was made so the plugin doesn't 
need the CoverArt AR anymore when a Jamendo URL is provided in any AR.

The bugtracker is not an appropriate location for the discussion so I 
move this to the ML now.
</introduction>

The reasoning is basically:
Some people (including me) would like to have some kind of API for 
plugins/programs etc. where the CoverArt URL can be retrieved directly 
(without knowledge of special websites) if the server somehow knows 
about it.
We don't have something like that know, so the CoverArt AR could be seen 
as the API right now.

This is the point where we actually have a disagreement.

I personally think, that the CoverArt AR like it is used now is pretty 
useless and redundant if we already have a Jamendo (or CD-baby, ..) URL 
provided through some other means and it is an unnecessary effort to 
create it and unnecessary information to display at the release page. 
If we see a Jamendo download and a cover, we have all the information 
we need already.
I also added, that technically a FULL image URL in the CoverArt AR would 
help any processing program that is not aware that there is something 
special about Jamendo download/CC links. However, right now we only add 
the exact same URL in the CoverArt Art that we already added in the CC 
AR.

Naturally, it is difficult to summarize the other argument, but I try:
The CC/download AR should only make this one connection in any case: the 
download, because this would be semantically simple. The CoverArt AR is 
then needed because it is semantically different.

Questions on the side:
Should MusicBrainz automatically display the CoverArt without the 
CoverArt AR, when we want to have a CoverArt AR attached?

I think we can't have extra CoverArt AR or even some kind of direct 
Image URL for amazon, because of license reasons. So we have to treat 
Amazon different as I understand it.
Should we treat Jamendo specially or any other Source specially if we 
are not forced to do it for license reasons? (e.g. making a CoverArt 
link unnecessary / parse it intelligently)


--JonnyJD
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