How-to: Add album art to your music library
Unfortunately Windows users are quite limited compared to OSX users when it comes to quality album art software. If you’re going through a “I need to find cover art for each music track I ‘own’ otherwise my collection will be incomplete” phase, you can use the following software:
OSX users should check out GrowlTunes (you need to have Growl installed), Sofa, or CoverBuddy (which looks awesome). Album covers are usually downloaded automatically based on the ID3 tags (so make sure your tags are accurate).
Windows users don’t have as many options short of saving cover art manually for each track. The one piece of software that did exactly what it claimed to do is AlbumArtFinder. You have two options, “Load albums without images” or “Load all albums”. AAF will use the ID3 tags to display relevant album covers. Your job is to decide which cover should go with each album.
The key is having accurate tags. You don’t need to worry about tags for CD imports or paid music service downloads. For you p2p freeloaders, use a music database like MusicBrainz to double check files. Most album art software crawls the Amazon music database for album art. Once in awhile specific album covers won’t be cataloged. If that’s the case, you’ll have to do the ol’ Google search. CDUniverse has been a pretty good backup for times when Amazon fell short of expectations.
