Getting Discogs Cover Art with SongKong

Discogs Image Authorization

SongKong uses various sources for finding cover art. Its primary source is the cover art provided by MusicBrainz via the Cover Art Archive, but the second most important source is the artwork provided by Discogs. However unfortunately recently Discogs changed the conditions of their API so that it no longer allows access to these images unless you have a Discogs account and authorise SongKong to use that account.

The good news is that Discogs accounts are completely free and straight-forward with no requirement to enter bank card details or sign up for any service so creating a Discogs account if you don't already have one is not such a hardship.The bad news is that Discogs is currently getting overloaded regularly and when this happens access to the API is curtailed, this includes the one-off image authorisation detailed below. So if possible don't try at internet peak times (evening time US timezone) , if it does fail at the first stage just try again.

With SongKong 1.23 released today it is recommended that you create a Discogs account if you do not have one already and then authorise SongKong for the best SongKong results as follows

1.Open your webbrowser and go to discogs.com

2. Login to Discogs or signup for an account if you do not already have one

3. Select File:Discogs Image Authorization within SongKong, and if you are logged into your Discogs account your webrowser  should open a page similar to:

If instead SongKong complains that Image Authorization failed , please try again at a quieter time.

4. Select the Authorise button and it should take you to a page like

5. Go back to SongKong, there should be a user dialog open, enter the code into it as follows:

6. Select OK and the following window should display

7. And that's it, now if SongKong is unable to get cover art from a MusicBrainz release it can probably get one from a linked Discogs release.

Jaikoz customers, the same Discogs image authorization will be added to Jaikoz within two weeks.

SongKong 1.23

In this new release there also many  improvements to matching and to the generated reports, I will explain these in more details in another post but for now all the fixes are listed at

http://jthink.net/songkong/news_build1030.jsp