Image data of album covers

[leod]

Hi, the FMA dataset looks amazing, thank you so much for sharing this!

I'm planning a research project that will involve multimodal models trained on album covers as well as the audio signal of tracks from the respective albums. Does FMA include cover art?

If I understand correctly from the FMA paper, cover art is not yet included. Quoting from the discussion section:

Cover images for tracks, albums, and artists are another public asset which may be of interest.

From what I can tell on the freemusicarchive.org website, albums seem to usually (always?) come with a cover image. I think I might be able to automatically download these based on the album names in the FMA dataset. However, I'm wondering if there is a better way. I would appreciate any recommendation.

[leod]

It seems that webapi.ipynb might basically answer my question already.

[mdeff]

Thanks for the kind words!

Cover art is indeed not included and should be easy to download automatically. You'll find URLs in the track_image_file column of raw_tracks.csv, album_image_file column of raw_albums.csv, and artist_image_file column of raw_artists.csv.

Since FMA got acquired it seems that the URLs have to be updated like the following:

• https://freemusicarchive.org/file/images/artists/AWOL_-_2009113014453413.jpg -> https://freemusicarchive.org/image?file=images/artists/AWOL_-_2009113014453413.jpg&width=290&height=290&type=image
• https://freemusicarchive.org/file/images/albums/AWOL_-_AWOL_-_A_Way_Of_Life_-_2009113011911435.jpg -> https://freemusicarchive.org/image?file=images/albums/AWOL_-_AWOL_-_A_Way_Of_Life_-_2009113011911435.jpg&width=290&height=290&type=image
• https://freemusicarchive.org/file/images/tracks/Clockcleaner_-_03_-_When_My_Ship_Comes_In_-_2009113051004857.jpg -> https://freemusicarchive.org/image?file=images/tracks/Clockcleaner_-_03_-_When_My_Ship_Comes_In_-_2009113051004857.jpg&width=290&height=290&type=track

I don't know if other combinations of width=290&height=290 could work.

Please share your work if you collect the covers. :) (Especially as the future of the FMA website seems uncertain.)

[leod]

Woohoo, thank you for the prompt and helpful response!

I've written a script for downloading the image data.

I've taken a first look at the image data -- so far it looks fine. Luckily, the download seems to have succeeded for many albums (13509/14854, i.e. 90.95%). I'm making the cover images available here for now: https://leod.org/data/fma_album_covers.zip (541 MiB). (I cannot guarantee that this URL will be available in the long run.)

I will close the ticket, thanks again!

[mdeff]

Thanks for sharing! I've saved it and will take care of the long-term hosting if there's demand. :)

You mention 13,509 covers but there are 14,225 images in your zip file. What's the difference?

[leod]

Great, thank you!

Regarding the difference: I've downloaded the images for all rows of raw_albums.csv where available. This yielded 14,225 images. However, only 13,509 of these raw albums actually have at least one track in tracks.csv, so these are the ones I've mentioned. I've included the rest of the images for completeness, but they are unlikely to be useful. Hope this adds up.

[mdeff]

It does! Thanks for precising.