If you ever tried to find a good program that could download most cover artwork automatically then you know that such applications are hard to find. Apple’s iTunes unfortunately does not embed the artwork properly into the songs which makes it pretty useless unless you use a program to export the artwork.

A better solution is the Album Art Downloader. It basically scans a folder, and its subfolders, for mp3 files and checks if they contain an jpg with an appropriate name, cover.jpg for instance. It assumes that the jpg will contain the cover artwork and skip that song or album. Every album or mp3 that does not contain such an image will be listed and can be added to a queue later on.

A semi-automatic process begins after adding the desired mp3 files to the queue. One album or song will be selected from the queue and several web databases will be searched for cover artwork of it. Among the databases are several Amazon stores, Google Image and several other online shops and free websites.

The handling afterwards feels a bit awkward at first. The discovered covers of the album are displayed in a separate window and the user can hover his mouse over an image to see a larger preview of it. A click on the disk icon next to each thumbnail saves the image into the folder of the album. The windows has to be closed in the end which will spawn a new window if at least one album is still in the queue.

It’s more or less pick and close all the time which can become boring pretty soon if you have hundreds of albums that need cover artwork. The program seems to hang sometimes, at least it appeared to on my computer but it always recovered from this later on. It does seem to have a bit of a problem with samplers. I witnessed it two times that it displayed each individual track of a sampler as an individual album.

I agree with Samer that this software definitely needs a function to integrate the cover artwork in the tags of the mp3 files as well. Its still a very nice application, well worth a try.

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The covers are downloaded into a subdirectory of the Harmony root folder. That folder hat a size of more than 15 Megabytes after the first run on my computer containing cover artwork for more than 450 music albums. As I said earlier the music that is displayed is directly connected to iTunes. Harmony recognizes new albums and deleted ones and downloads cover art for the new and removes cover art for the old ones.

Once the album art has been downloaded the user can navigate through is record collection by flipping through them with the mouse or entering a search term in the search box at the top of Harmony. Music can be added to the playlist or played immediately, albums can be flipped through while playing music.

Harmony looks great but lacks several features that I like in a music player. Playlists can’t be saved, there is no volume control or settings at all which is probably the biggest problem. Harmony does not play .aac or .m4a songs by default but a plugin is available that adds support for those two formats.

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Undercover XP is such a freeware that makes it very easy to create covers in the correct size for many different types of media. This includes covers for CDs and DVDs, DVD boxes, inlays, Playstation backs and Digital Pictures.

Just add a image in formats such as jpg, bmp, gif or png to Undercover XP and the tool will automatically resize the image to the right format for the selected media.

Undercover XP comes equipped with a format editor that makes it easy to add new formats for media that you own. Just add a new format with the exact sized that you want it to be.

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