How to get high quality album art for your DAP
TUAW ran a nice tip last week on how to get high quality album art for your iTunes library, but it should actually work for digital audio players other than iPods as well. If you point your browser to Josh’s iTunes Album Art Grabber page, you can search the iTunes servers for any artist and album combo. Several of the albums I searched for came back with a 600 x 600 pixel image, which looks magnificent on small-screened music players capable of showing off album covers. TUAW indicates that some of the album art tops out at 1425 x 1425 pixels, but I didn’t find any of those gi-gunda-sized pics; then again, I listen to Country, so I suppose I’m lucky to even find music.
There’s no automation involved here, however: Josh’s site will provide you a download link to each cover and you can simply save the album art and then update your collection manually. It may take some time, but if your mobile device has a worthy screen, why not give it some worthy album art? I’ve never been happy with the art on my Zune, so I’ll be looking forward to testing this on the QVGA screen to see what happens.
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I actually went through this over the weekend.
I was getting tired of the lack of artwork available for cover flow on iTunes.
I had pretty good luck on Amazon’s web site. I typed in the album – clicked on it and copied the artwork to the iTunes file in “get info”
I will try this for the covers that had poor resolution.
I know, I know – a little too much free time on my hands.
Personally I quite like using Google Images for cover art. The search obviously works and it tells you the resolution of the images before you select them so you can choose the best quality. Now all I need is an easy way to get good looking cover art into Media Centre.
Another really great way is to get a killer program called Tag&Rename (google it). It has a built-in Amazon search for covers. They aren’t 1400 pixels, but 500×500 or 300×300 even looks quite passable.
There is also an app that isn’t available from its original home page (dunno what happened there) but I have found one place on the net where it is preserved:
http://www.mp3buzz.net/index.php/2006/02/01/album-art-how-to-2/
It’s called the Album Cover Art Downloader, and works really well too.
You can also download high resolution cover art from http://www.allcdcovers.com. AllCDCovers is a community driven website offering free high quality album art for non commercial use. All the CD and DVD covers are uploaded, approved and ranked by the users.