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.

The free Open Source program Automatic Cover Tool for MP3 offers an automated alternative. The JAVA application supports saving album art as image tags in the media files, and as folder images, in case the media files already contain an image tag.

automatic cover tool mp3

Only a few steps need to be completed to add album covers to a mp3 collection. The main interface lists all the options. Users who are in a hurry can select a folder on the computer and click the Start button to start the process. ACT-MP3 uses the Discogs database to find album covers. The process may take a while depending on the number of mp3 in the collection.

The program offers two options. First, album art can be saved to a folder as jpg, png or gif. Second the covers can be saved as image tags. Both options can be disabled individually. Users who only want to save the album covers in the folder can use that option for instance.

Another interesting setting is the option to force the program to use the folder image as the media tag if present in the folder. That may be helpful for users who have downloaded mp3 that do not contain album covers as mp3 tags but a folder image.

The detection rate of the Automatic Cover Tool For MP3 is solid, but not perfect. Additional cover art databases would be a welcome addition in the program.

ACT-MP3 is available for download at the project website over at Sourceforge. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows and Linux.

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.

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.

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.

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.