I’m still getting used to not calling it “Grooveshark Lite.” For those who haven’t noticed, it’s been re-branded as just plain old Grooveshark. On one hand, it’s an awesome testament to just how successful the project has been. On the other hand, it’s a little harder to talk about it now. I can take credit for a large portion of Grooveshark Lite, but I can’t really take credit for a large portion of Grooveshark; Grooveshark represents so much more to me than just our player.
Anyway, thanks to a nifty little Perl script that Travis helpfully rewrote for me to be more compatible with our hosting environment, I was able to grab art for an extra 57,000 or so albums that we had not been able to get from our partners previously. What does this mean for you, the user? You should see less of this:
in your queue and song info panels, and more real album art, like this:
What’s the magic trick? Simple, the script looks for art embedded inside the mp3s that we have associated with an album, guesses at which piece of art is best. It’s surprising how many mp3s actually have art embedded in them.
Hopefully this will make Grooveshark more usable. I know I find it very frustrating when I have a large queue filled mostly with the default album art; it’s very hard to tell where you are when everything looks the same.