Add Album art to your mp3 collection

Martin Brinkmann
Feb 26, 2008
Updated • Dec 8, 2012
Music and Video
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9

Many mp3 players support album art, showing it to the user in the display. Several software players support it as well, for instance the Itunes Control plugin that I wrote about earlier this week. I don't know a single application however that can process a entire music library automatically and add album art to it.

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.

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Comments

  1. boguzz said on January 7, 2011 at 12:31 am
    Reply

    Thank. I was using Mp3Tag to include album art directly into mp3 as show in this article:
    http://www.withsteps.com/602/include-album-art-into-mp3-files.html

    I really like Media monkey because is doing all the job. I don’t have to edit every single mp3 file.

  2. Denny said on December 31, 2010 at 3:08 am
    Reply

    There is a cool freeware able to find and add album arts to mp3s very easily: Creevity Mp3 Cover Downloader. Try googling it, it’s very handy.

  3. bipu said on November 19, 2010 at 6:01 pm
    Reply

    Thank you

  4. Serif said on April 27, 2010 at 5:39 pm
    Reply

    Very amazing!!!

  5. Bob said on August 26, 2009 at 12:02 am
    Reply

    wwwwwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaatttttttttttttttttt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    THIS SITE ROCKS

  6. Bob said on August 26, 2009 at 12:01 am
    Reply

    Hello I like this site

  7. Bob said on August 26, 2009 at 12:00 am
    Reply

    Hi!

  8. XxDeepxX said on February 27, 2008 at 7:05 am
    Reply

    Thanks, have been looking 4 something like this since months!

  9. sauzatime said on February 26, 2008 at 11:52 pm
    Reply

    Part of the beauty of MM is the scripts people are creating to increase functionality. There is a script called Batch Art Finder that you can install that searches Google for images for as much (or little) of your library as you want. There are some GREAT configuration options to choose from also. Check the forums on the MM site, in the Scripts section.

    I used it, worked like a charm.

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