Tapes have given way to CDs and now CDs have given way (some if not all) to MP3 files. Then there are a huge lot of MP3 songs we download from the web or rip from music CDsHow to Rip a CD to MP3 & Auto-Name Files CorrectlyHow to Rip a CD to MP3 & Auto-Name Files CorrectlyRead More. The first rule of organization says that we should neatly put them in the right folders and then tag them. There are tools4 Easy Ways Fix Music Tags & Organize Music Library4 Easy Ways Fix Music Tags & Organize Music LibraryRead More for the job and some good ones at that.
Going back to the job of making our music collection look neat, we come to the “˜face’ of our songs and music albums – the album cover or specifically, album cover art.
Just like film posters, album covers deck up a song or the album it belongs to. Album cover art also fancies up the visual interface of our digital music players. For instance, cycling through the album art in your iPod. So just compare the two windows – one with album covers and one with just data tags. Get the picture (pun intended)?
Create a new folder in your 'My Files' and name it for example 'My Music' and make a folder in the folder titled 'My Music' named after an album you wish to add the art to. Then find and download the desired album art and put it in the folder you named to match the album.
- Right-click on the folder which contains the music and select the option Browse for Album Art.Album Art Downloader will initialize and search for the folder. If an album art already exists, it.
- Explore the best independent music on Jamendo Music: explore our communities by genre, mood, instrument or theme. Free music downloads.
- Find full free album download tracks, artists, and albums. Find the latest in full free album download music at Last.fm. Find full free album download tracks, artists, and albums. Find the latest in full free album download music at Last.fm. Playing via Spotify Playing via YouTube.
- You may think that software media players like iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc., can find and download all the album art you need for your digital music library.
- This great album art changer or finder can download album art to music and supports manual editing of music album art as well. It can also used to complete other music information, such as album, artist and so on.
- Cover Retriever is freeware that locates album art for MP3s. It uses data from the tags of the music files to search for the art using Google's search engine. Download the application and select the folder where you keep your MP3s.
Tools such as MP3TagOrganize and Tag your Music Library with Mp3tagOrganize and Tag your Music Library with Mp3tagRead More (recommended as one of the better ones in the free download category) ping online databases like Amazon, Discogs, or freedb to gather all the metadata for a music file. That includes the album cover art. But what if you get a blank for a particular album or the one you get is not the choicest? You have to go and get the right cover art for yourself.
So, enter the album cover art engines.
AllCDCovers
If you put in a search for album art cover or CD cover, it’s very likely you will get this website in the search results. AllCDCovers seems to be the first stop for all album art. The website is about covers but it also has a lot of other activities to offer. It is community driven and offers contests for uploaders. Uploaders who submit high quality album art covers stand to win quite a number of cool prizes.
A 3 step wizard searches out covers for you in music, movies and games. One timesaver for the downloader is that the covers are also rated by quality. The download page also gives out artist and album info. You can choose to download any part of the cover (front, back or CD).
AllCDCovers now also provides a browser toolbar, though that might be a bit of overkill for album art covers.
Albumart
If the earlier web service was busy, this seems almost bare bones. Put in your search query and select between CD and DVD. Albumart throws up its results sourced from Amazon. There is no download button and a click on the thumbnail takes you to the Amazon page. The interface with Amazon is unfortunately not perfect because I threw up zero results while with Amazon, I got it all.
Albumart Exchange
Has a motley and quirky selection of artwork. But a visit to this site tells you that the guy behind it is passionate about his creation. The author of course doesn’t have the copyright but he has improved upon the original artworks. There are more than 70,000 images with an average resolution of 600×600. Visit this site just to see the beauty in the variety of album art covers.
Album Cover Art
Album Cover Art is another cover art site with an uncomplicated look. You get a lineup of the most popular and new releases on the homepage. If the album cover you are searching for isn’t there, browse for it in the Genres or query it in the search box. You get the album art and also information about the tracks in the album is listed along with the Amazon link.
SlothRadio
SlothRadio is basically an online rock radio station with a cover finder. SlothRadio gives you covers for not only CD and DVDs but also games and books. The landing page is just a search box where you put in your query like the name of the artist or the album. You can also use the Advanced Search Option if you want a cover of a specific size or want to sort it in a specific order. The collection is quite extensive and is again sourced from Amazon.
Sleevage
Sleevage is a bit off the beaten track but it does define the word “˜art’ in album art. It features an assorted bunch of artwork and not all the stuff is for the regular bands. The search engine is slick and gives you six ways to search for your album art. This site is an eyeful just for the quality of the featured album art.
Seek a Cover
Check out covers for music albums and movies using the search box. You can also go through the archive by alphabet. The covers are all high quality and in the mid-resolution range.
Usually the search for album covers begins and ends with a Google Image Search or we leave it to the tagging feature in our mp3 software. If you are picky and finicky about your album art covers, then these websites give you seven more options. Searching for the right cover art can be a painstaking chore especially if it’s a manual job. But if you love your music collection, then these resources should definitely make it a more pleasurable search.
What about your album art? Have you paid attention to it lately? Let us know your favored method of collecting and organizing your mp3 collection (with the covers in place).
Image Credit : Leo Reynolds
I've always used album art exchange but recently I've found that the site has been blocking my region. Thanks for the list, these should do just fine.
https://fanart.tv has high quality covers as well. It's amongst my favourite album art sites these days.
You might also try http://www.allbum.it - the database is small (only a thousand or so) but there are lots of very alternative (read 'naughty') remixes of album art as well as good quality originals. Most of the stuff is obscure but that's good because it's the hard-to-find material that's usually the most difficult to get a copy of.
Of course quality is an issue! Otherwise people would just use Amazon & Google for the images. When combined, THEY have the largest covers collection. I think that perhaps you have not done the research before opening the site.
So, you do not think that there is anything wrong with taking images from other sites to add to YOUR collection and make money off of advertisers with THEIR hard work?! Seriously?
P.S. There is no legal reason to need to print a cover, BTW...
As you said we are off-topic but I think I have to reply to your senteces.
1) You're right, some audio covers are at lower quality (I've searched for dvd cover when I replied to you). I know that pixels aren't the only quality factor but I think that there is only one site that is working only in high quality (Albumart Exchange).
2) Covers are from other sites and from my own collection. I'm trying to make a site with the largest covers collection and I want to develop an API to leave the possibility to software developer to integrate covers in their software (like mp3tag). If you want quality use Albumart Exchange.
3) Yes, I want to give a free service and, if I can, I want to make money, don't you use Google that have the same phylosopy?
4) Why? As wrote before: 'I'm trying to make a site with the largest covers collection' and I've a lot of work to do, I've never said that I have the best covers collection. Probably you have asked the same when Google started spidering? There was Altavista too...If you want we can continue our discussion using email (info [at] freecoversworld.com), I think that makeusof readers donesn't care about our words ;-)
In this case, providing a FREE service has nothing to do with Hosting costs. You cannot charge money to access images that you do not hold the copyright to. The studios will sue you and shut you down before you can blink. You should be able to host that site for about $8 (or less) USD a month.
No offense but Jinkers is right - taking images from other sites and making a buck off of it is wrong. Doing so just to make money is even worse! In my opinion, it's petty obvious by all of the advertising and images from other sites what this site is all about. This site Freecoversworld is an 'also ran' and not worth the review. The author was correct to exclude it. Not trying to be mean, it's just the truth.
Try http://www.freecoversworld.com! It's a new site with over 100,000 CD and DVD covers. You can simply search for a cover by its name or select a category. I recently added movie informations for DVD covers and album information for CD covers.
Re: Freecoversworld: To review honestly and IMO , Looks like the quality is pretty mediocre and you almost have as much advertising as AllCDCovers.com. I prefer the gallery type interface.
Well, I don't think is mediocre ;-) All the images are at least (about) 1000x1000 pixel, that I think is enough for print purpose. This week I'll upload about 28000 new audio and movie cover with very high quality (over 3000x3000 pixel).
Unfortunatelly the site is really new so nobody helped me uploading new high quality covers for now, I hope to find volunteers in the next months.
And about advertising ... yes probably there's a lor of advertising, but web space really cost :-(
I'm talking about over 40GB of images.
We're starting to stray off-topic here but 1.) most of the Audio covers I looked at there were 500x500 and not in the right color space. Just becaus an image is large like 1000x doesn't mean that that it is of high quality 2.) based upon the count, I assume that these are from other sites and not their own scans. Stealing is never cool. 3.)I am quite familiar with hosting costs and if your're shopping around properly, you should be paying mostly for bandwidth used, not storage. IMHO, this site has come along and is trying to make money. 4.) And finally, WHY? All of the sites listed above already do what you are doing and have been doing it well for years. No offense but this site offers nothing new, just artwork taked from the other sites with along new advertising! It looks like their just trying to hop on the wagon and make a couple of bucks and offer nothing new as far as interface ofr content. No thanks.
AlbumArtExchange also has an image quality rating system. In fact, it was the first to offer such a feature. Whether using AAE or ACDC, image quality should be judged by YOU and not an arbitrary rating that most users don't bother to vote with.
While I can see how you could look at it as 'motley and quirky', we prefer to think of it as thorough and eclectic.:-) AAE's goal is to provide the best images are available out there and of a huge variety of albums.
As far as online image searches via Google images and the like, I want to say that these larger sites are NOT indexed in a way that you can find those images in the search results; you have to go to the site.
http://www.discogs.org is another site that has (usually) decent scants of cover art
I agree. Those websites are probably already indexed by google anyway
http://www.rateyourmusic.com it's a must for this task
I know that this isnt technically a 'website' but it does search all of the sites mentioned here. I think its great piece of software. Been using it for ages with no problems whatsoever.
Great list of resources, and good to see prog rock classic 'In the Court of the Crimson King' in the first photo!
Albumart Exchange is my personal fav
Saikat,
I think you've not mentioned one of the most amazing sites out there for album artwork. It'll be great if you can mention this as a post script.
Simplicity is the key to finding artwork, and this site has never failed me. All you need to do is type and the album cover is ready :)
I usually just use Google Images whenever mp3tag fails to recognize an album... much wider coverage than any of the mentioned websites and a variety of sizes and alternate images.
I agree. Those websites are probably already indexed by google anyway.
Searching for images on Google will not show you the images from the bigger sites like AlbumArtExchange.com or AllCDCovers.com. The entire point of these sites is to provide images which are of superior quality than those found in Amazon or Google search results.
Introduction.
Many people use portable players or listen to MP3 music while working. There are several nice things about MP3 format: music files are pretty small and can be played virtually everywhere. They also can contain all necessary information about the songs: title, artist, album, year of publishing, lyrics, album art, and other fields of ID3 tags.
Album art can be saved as a separate file for each album (usually it is 'folder.jpg', sometimes the file can be hidden). In such case, if a file is moved or copied from the folder to another location (for example, when creating a compilation), it will be no more associated with the album cover, and so no picture will be shown anymore when playing the file.
Another option is to save album art inside each MP3 file. MP3 format has a special picture tag field for this purpose.
You can download MP3 album art using mp3Tag Pro.
Step 1: Download and install the program.
Download mp3Tag Pro to a known location. Run setup and follow on-screen instructions to install the application.
Step 2: Start the program. Select MP3 files.
Launch mp3Tag Pro. Its main window will be shown.
Navigate to the folder where your MP3 files are stored. You can type the path directly into the field in the upper part of the window, or use the 'Browse' button on the right. If needed, press 'Scan subfolders' button.
Select all files that you want to supply with cover art. Check if the 'Artist' and 'Album' fields are not empty. mp3Tag Pro can also search for 'Title' and 'Artist', or any other combination of the fields, but more information means better chances to get correct results. If you know the album's name, but the field is empty, you can simply select all files, enter the name into the corresponding field, and click 'Save'.
Step 3: Download and save album art.
Once the files are selected, click 'Download cover' button on the toolbar. If you see no album art area, press 'Ctrl' + 'P'.
Youtube To Mp3
The program will ask you if you really want to download and save pictures for all files.
Click 'Yes' to continue. mp3Tag Pro will start searching and downloading cover art. The pictures will be saved inside selected MP3 files automatically.
You can use the above method on files from different albums at once (just select as many files as you wish).
The trial version of mp3Tag Pro adds a small logo 'Trial version of mp3Tag Pro' to all downloaded pictures. If you like the features, you can register the program and remove this restriction.
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