diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'guidelines')
| -rw-r--r-- | guidelines/albums-and-tracks.md | 18 |
1 files changed, 18 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/guidelines/albums-and-tracks.md b/guidelines/albums-and-tracks.md index 979e919..6665cfc 100644 --- a/guidelines/albums-and-tracks.md +++ b/guidelines/albums-and-tracks.md @@ -1,5 +1,23 @@ # Album & Track Guidelines +### Source high resolution artworks whenever possible + +We always want to archive the best quality versions of artworks available! Since most albums on the wiki come from Bandcamp, we've developed a simple-to-use tool that helps with this: [bc-art](https://github.com/hsmusic/bc-art#readme). After following the installation instructions, just run the program with the option `--hsmusic` and the URL for the album or track whose art you want to download, and it'll handle the rest. + +**Bandcamp on the Wayback Machine, captured June 2013 or more recently:** Currently bc-art doesn't support crawling the Wayback Machine, so you'll have to work manually here. *Bandcamp stores higher resolution artworks than the big-size thumbnails you usually see online.* As far as we can tell, it stores source-resolution! Take the image address of the artwork you're interested in (less the web.archive.org part), e.g. `http://f0.bcbits.com/img/a3267825338_2.jpg`, and change the `_2.jpg` to just `_0`, e.g. `http://f0.bcbits.com/img/a3267825338_0`. (If you provide a file extension, it will just be ignored. The source image might not be a JPEG image.) Load that up and save it to disk, and you're good to go. Bandcamp doesn't appear to delete old uploads, so even though the `_0` URLs aren't embedded anywhere online and so aren't archived by the Wayback Machine, they currently remain accessible on Bandcamp's live servers. + +**Bandcamp on the Wayback Machine, prior June 2013:** The updated URL system was introduced around June 2013, and previous captures used a different URL system for artworks ([the same artwork](https://web.archive.org/web/20130429200600/http://homestuck.bandcamp.com/) used to be `http://f0.bcbits.com/z/36/82/3682125582-1.jpg`). Unfortunately, we don't currently know how to convert those old URLs into the new format (it's not clear if that's even possible), so it's impossible to access higher quality artworks than whatever the Wayback Machine captured at the time. + +**Tumblr:** Tumblr is *feisty.* Track artists often shared their illustrations on Tumblr; regardless the source resolution or format, these are always 1200x1200 at most, and tend to be relatively randomly JPEG or PNG. Tumblr is also very picky about actually letting you download the image (which also stumps the Wayback Machine nowadays). The upshot is that since it's on illustrators own blogs, the uploads generally *aren't* already downscaled to a particularly low resolution format, that the album organizers might've wanted artworks in - so you might get a higher resolution image than what was ever uploaded to Bandcamp. Starting from [the post itself](https://worthikids.tumblr.com/post/22111816772/i-wanted-to-make-something-for-candles-and), click the image you want to download to get it [in full-size preview](https://worthikids.tumblr.com/image/22111816772). Copy this image's address, e.g. `https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3a64h6GUf1rqt8wso1_r1_1280.pnj`. Download this URL using... `wget`! Or similar non-browser-based downloading programs, `curl` should also work. If you use a browser Tumblr will just serve the preview window all over again, instead of the image. You *may* also be able to use your browser's inspect element to save the result of the image Tumblr serves when not requested directly (check "Sources" or "Network" tab), but it may depend on the browser. + +**Album downloads, "extra" art packs, etc:** It's always worth just checking the album downloads and other related material releases! Sometimes the albums just flat-out include the artworks at high or source resolution, as bonus pack-in files (the same way album booklets or sheet music are sometimes distributed). If the album has a non-standard landing page (for example [LOFAM2](https://hsfanmusic.skaia.net/lofam2.html)), take a careful look around in case there are downloads specifically for the album artworks. + +**Selecting the main artwork:** When the stars align, you may come across one artwork that is *definitively* the best version of the track artwork used for the album. Other times it's, not so clear: you may have a 500x500 PNG from Bandcamp, but a 1000x1000 JPEG from Tumblr - complete with undeniably better graphics, but pretty harsh compression artefacting, too. If this happens, we generally prefer to use the higher *resolution* artwork as the main one (in `media/album-art`). But be sure to include the lower resolution, better-compression (or flat-out lossless) image as part of the commentary or an "additional artwork", too! Here's an example description: + +> There are two "HQ" versions of this track's artwork. The one used as the main cover art is the version posted on Tumblr, which is 800x800 (possibly source resolution), but has JPEG artefacting. Below is the 500x500 artwork used on Bandcamp, which is a clean PNG, but blurs some details (due to downscaling). + +**Including alternate artworks:** "Alternate artworks" refer to any artwork where the *work* appears to deviate from the artwork used on the album (on Bandcamp) - so, the contents represented by the image are different, not just its raw image quality/resolution. Even if it's just a minor difference! We generally *don't* replace the main artwork for a track with an alternate artwork. Instead, alternate artworks are included in commentary (or as "additional artworks"). As usual, be sure to include related commentary and a link to the source for the alternate artwork. + ### Name albums and tracks according to Bandcamp release Generally, HSMusic uses Bandcamp as the primary reference for album listings. Many albums which have been released across multiple platforms have slight differences in track naming (e.g. capitalization) — we prefer the naming on Bandcamp first. We also do our best not to editorialize here. Even if different tracks follow different capitalization rules seemingly arbitrarily, we leave that as-is! |