For my ‘sister project’ I had the idea to print physical albums for virtual Spotify albums. It works using the ’new’ Spotify barcodes. Read the original blog-item.
My first attempt to create these was a very manual approach: I made a screenshot from Spotify on my phone (the only place where the barcode is shown), cropped the code, pasted this in a Pages-file (the Apple-equivalent of Word) and added an album cover + tracklisting I found on Wikipedia. This would take over half an hour per album!
Automatically creating album-covers with a Spotify code 🔗
In my 2nd attempt I tried to script as much of this process as I could. In addition, I decided to skip the tracklisting (keeping just the cover + Spotify code).
This means I no longer needed to print double-sided. Which in turn meant I can have the covers be printed as ‘square photos’, so they look great now!
Bash-scripting 🔗
I had to dust-off my scripting capacities and my first attempt went a bit ‘overboard’. I created a script that:
- automatically cuts the Spotify-code, the album-title and artist-name from an Android screenshot, using GraphicsMagick
- uses Tesseract (an OCR-engine) to parse the album-title and artist into text
- asks the user if the OCR was done correctly (with the option to provide a better album/artist)
- uses Glyr (a metadata search-engine for music) to get a load of album-covers
- finds the best-looking album-cover (approximately, using filesize) using the artist/album from the previous step
- pastes the Spotify-code on top of the album-cover (in two versions: with the code either in the left or right bottom-corner)
Which worked GREAT! Except that all albums returned by Glyr were kind of ‘meh’-quality. I introduced several improvements, but in the end it never was ‘great’.
You can download v1 here to play around with.
Version 2 of the Bash-script 🔗
I took my losses and re-examined my options. I found that the resolution of the cover in the Android-screenshot was actually a lot better than whatever Glyr returned. So I greatly simplified my Bash-script. Now it only:
- automatically cuts the Spotify-code and the cover from an Android screenshot, using GraphicsMagick
- pastes the Spotify-code on top of the album-cover
Optionally, you can enable Tesseract to have a cool filename as well.
Ofcourse v2 is also available to play around with.
The end-result 🔗
Here’s some example albums. You can scan them with Spotify (on mobile: tap ‘search’ and then the ‘camera’ in the search bar).
Printed 🔗
I had them printed as ‘square photos’, they look great!
Generating JPG 🔗
If you plan to do this as well, you need to convert the PNGs to JPG before you can print them, which is easy with GraphicsMagick:
for f in result/*.png; do gm convert $f -unsharp 2x0.5+0.7+0 $f.jpg; done
This adds some sharpening as well, which looks a bit nicer when printing IMHO
album-covers obviously don’t fall under the Creative Commons license