Cover Retriever is a free open source software for Windows that makes it easy to add album cover art to mp3 and flac audio files on the computer.

All you have to do is to start the program after downloading and unzipping it. The program prompts for a music directory on startup. Once supplied, it will crawl all the mp3 and flac files in the directory – including subfolders – and display them in a list in the sidebar.

All albums are sorted in their original folder structure. The program furthermore retrieves album covers for every album or mp3 file that you click on.

You can select a cover by simply clicking on it. Covers are retrieved using the audio files audio tags. There is no way to do a custom search from inside the program, which is probably the biggest flaw right now.

The program displays each cover’s width and height in the main interface. To take a closer look, you can double-click an album cover to open it in a larger preview window.

You can click the Save button in the main window or in the preview window to save the album cover. You have the option to save it into the folder of the audio file or have the program embed the cover directly.

Another issue that people with a large music collection will run into is that there is no option to process a number of albums at the same time. There is no option to let the program pick the cover and save it to as the album art.

Cover Retriever nevertheless is a handy program for small to mid sized collections that miss some album cover art. Windows users can download the latest version of the program from the Sourceforge project website. The program is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. Please note that the application requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.

Creevity Mp3 Cover Downloader is a free software for Windows that makes it dead easy to add covers to mp3 files. The program scans the My Music folder on startup and displays covers for the first mp3 file found in it. It is possible to browse for another folder in case the music collection is stored elsewhere.

Information about the active song are displayed at the top along with controls to play it and switch to another one stored in the folder. Mp3 Cover Downloader downloads six covers automatically from the Internet and displays them in its interface. A click on any of the covers and the selection of Apply adds the cover to the mp3 file.

A prompt like the one shown on the screenshot below is displayed if a cover is already present in the mp3 file.

A click on load other covers loads additional covers from the web. This is handy if the six covers listed are not matching the mp3 file.

Left and right arrows on the keyboard, and left and right icons in the header are used to switch between mp3 files stored in the active folder.

Mp3 Cover Downloader is a fast responsive program to add or change mp3 album covers. It unfortunately misses a feature to add a cover to all mp3 files of a folder which means that it takes longer than it should to add the same cover to all mp3 files of a folder.

Mp3 Cover Downloader is available at the developer website over at Creevity. It tested without problems on a 64-bit Windows 7 Professional test system. Developers state that the application is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows from Windows XP on.

There are however a few problems related to cover art compatibility. Some media players, like Apple’s iTunes for instance, have the ability to add covert art. This is however done in a way that makes it impossible for other music players to access that cover art.

And then there are different locations where cover art can be saved, namely in tags or as separate images in the music folder.

CovArt Ops is a portable software from our friends over at Donation Coder. The software can be used to check an entire folder (and subfolders) of music for cover art.

The scan does not take long and CovArt Ops will display various information about each album that was discovered during the scan including if cover art is included in the album, the type of cover art (folder image or tag), the resolution of that image and the path on the local computer system. The program can also display the cover art if available.

The program can be used to sort a music collection so that all albums without cover art become visible in the interface. The information (all or selected rows) that have been gathered during the scan can be exported in a csv file which makes the processing easier.

CovArt Ops does not have an option to download cover art. Is is therefor only possible to use the information that it presents to find the missing cover art. It can be a very helpful program for users who want to update their music collection manually instead of using a software program to automatically download cover art like the previously reviewed Album Art Downloader.

Covart Ops is available at the Donation Coder forum. It should be compatible with most versions of Microsoft Windows. Worked fine on our Windows 7 Pro test system.

The program will automatically display the covers of the currently playing song in its interface. Next to the cover are information about the title, artist, album, playing time and basic controls to start, stop and skip songs. Several player specific options are available in the menu including rating songs or adding them to playlists.

The program will use the covers that are available in the music player or folder of the music. It has options to search for album covers which is helpful if no cover art is available for the selected song or album. The covers can then be easily added to the album.

The window can be set to be always on top, locked or pinned to the desktop. CD Art Display is highly configurable and comes with its own skin repository at Deviant Art which contains dozens of skins for the player.

The options are extensive. Users who hide the taskbar will be glad that the balloon tips that appear in the system tray can be disabled. It is also possible to add additional cover directories or make the program download covers automatically from sources like Amazon.

Update: The latest version of CD Art Display has been released in 2009. The program is still compatible with recent versions of the Windows operating system. It is however likely that it will stop working at one point in time.

The latest versions of the program have received feature additions like an Amazon Cover Art downloader. It is likely that at least some of the features that depend on external services are no longer working properly.

The software will automatically search the Internet for information about the current song and display the album art and lyrics in two independent windows. It is possible to refine the search if the first hit did not display the correct items. It can happen that the lyrics are not the only information displayed as the software uses an auto parser to parse the contents.

This can be fixed easily however by simply removing the unnecessary information. Results can be saved so that only those information will be displayed the next time the song is being played on the computer system.

The program can also be configured to look in mp3 and playlists for album art and lyrics before searching the Internet for those information. There is naturally also a way to save the discovered album art and lyrics to the music to make it permanently available.

Apple’s iTunes does it almost. You can select an option in iTunes to download album art of all selected songs using the iTunes store. That downloads lots of artwork, the main problem however is that this artwork is not added to the mp3 file directly but to a database only. If you use another application like Windows Media Player or XBMC the artwork will not be displayed. That’s a big issue if you transfer the music to computers without iTunes.

That means that I won’t be using iTunes to add album art to my mp3 collection. The best way that I discovered is to use Media Monkey. It’s semi-automatic. You select all mp3s of an album, right-click the selection and select Auto Tag From Web or press CTRL + L instead.

It can take some time if you have a large collection of mp3 files but it is definitely worth it. The process does not only add album art to the mp3 collection but also tags the files properly. It takes about 10 seconds per album.

I sorted my collection by album in Media Monkey at the beginning and began to work the mp3 collection from top to bottom selecting all songs of an album each time.

Update: Media Monkey is available as a free and commercial software program for the Windows operating system. The developers have recently released version 4 of the music software.

Other options include the Album Art Downloader or the Automatic Album Cover Tool to add cover art to mp3 files.