Album Cover Art Downloader Music Utility
Here’s a program that will semi-automatically download album cover images for your music collection. All you have to do is point it at the root of your music directory and for each directory, the program will download a set of corresponding (well, best guess) album covers from the Internet, from which you can choose one that suits your fancy.
If you are using a non-English version of Windows, please do not use the current release of the program as there have been some reports of MP3 tag corruption.
Note that due to the latest changes in Amazon’s Product Advertising API, Album Cover Art Downloader is unable to download any images from Amazon for the time being.
Currently supported image providers:
At least the following programs make use of the cover images:
- KDE, GNOME and others that follow the FreeDesktop.org .desktop-entry spec
- Windows XP Explorer
- Windows Media Player 9+
- CDcover, an XMMS plugin
- CoverViewer, another XMMS plugin.
- wmalbum, a WindowMaker dock applet
- Various WinAMP plugins, for example Cover TAG.
In addition, some portable music players can show the cover image if it is embedded in the MP3 file.
Source version requirements
The standalone versions are completely self-contained, and thus require no prior Python installation or any further dependencies. Just extract them to some directory and you’re good to go. The standalone packages were made with McMillan Enterprises, Inc.’s excellent Installer. The Windows installer was made with InnoSetup.
In order to run the source packages you’ll need:
- Python 2.3 or better with python-xmlbase.
- QT >= 2.3 or >= 3.1 and PyQT, the Python bindings.
- Python Imaging Library
- GNU make
On Debian the following command should get you rolling in a jiffy:
Internals
The cover images are in one or more of the following places:
- folder.jpg for Windows XP
- .folder.png and an Icon entry in .directory for Konqueror, etc.
- ID3v2 APIC frame, which is embedded into the MP3 files.
- Additional custom image targets are supported
Downloads
- Red Hat RPM package · albumart-1.6.6-1.noarch.rpm
- Red Hat RPM source package · albumart-1.6.6-1.src.rpm
- Windows installer · albumart-1.6.6-setup.zip
- Source code · albumart-1.6.6.tar.gz
- Debian DEB package · albumart_1.6.6-1_all.deb