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[Mads_H]

I have 800 albums in my jukebox. And when I started  three years ago cover art was not a big issue, therefore almost none of them have cover art assigned.

Is there an easy way to get cover art for more tracks/albums at once?

thanks

[lee269]

Lots of ways - heres one (assuming you dont have the pictures and want to get them from the internet).

First select all your audio files with no images. Theres an autosmartlist for this (Task - no images). Select all the files, right click and choose Image/Get from internet. MC will find all the cover art it can. Its not always perfect but it will be better than finding 800 images by hand. Theres options in Tools/Options/File Naming and Location to set where you want cover art to be saved.

[loraan]

For manually assigning cover art, both amazon and allmusic.com are good choices. Copy from the web site and then right-click/image/paste from clipboard.

[DocLotus]

Hi  Mads_H,

I have tried several ways & Web sites to download CD cover art but was always dissatisfied with the results.

Problems encountered were...

* Had to hunt around through many sites to find rare or out of print CD covers.

* Many covers did not match the actual cover on my CD (many were taken from vinyl records which sometimes have a different, or slightly different, cover or were European or Asian versions for the cover art... I live in the States).

* The scanning of the covers were sometimes less then professional (poor image quality, poor color match, low resolution, etc.)

I finally gave up on trying to acquire all my covert art from the Internet.

Since I have a wonderful HP color scanner, I decided to scan them in myself... a wise choice in the long run.

As it turned out, after playing around with several scans, I discovered that I could actually get my cover art much faster from my own scanner then I could from the Internet. Also, I could completely control the whole scanning process to get the final results that I was looking for.

Once I had my scanner setup determined, I would scan 15 - 20 covers in a row.  This went surprisingly fast after getting the hang of it.

I wanted all my covers to end up at 1000 x 1000 pixels, so I scanned each in at 400 dots per inch.  As each cover is 5 inches this produced a 2000 x 2000 (400 dpi x 5 inch) scan.

I then edited each cover in Adobe Photoshop Elements II & reduced the size to 1000 x 1000.  Over scanning at twice the desired final resolution then reducing to one half (2000 reduced to 1000) has the effect of removing most interference patterns caused by the scanning process.

I used Adobe to clean up imperfections, square & crop the image to the final size.

What I ended up with were exact copies of all of my CD covers in the exact resolution that I wanted with great color control.

The final results are some really great images in MC.

[jleerigby]

Look no further than the King and his MC plug ins:

http://www.spartasoft.com/

[Uwe]

@DocLotus

That sounds also interesting for me. What is the average filesize of your images at this size ? Do you use jpg ?
It appears a little bit whimsical to me, that thousends of scanners scan the same CD Covers...

Uwe

[Mads_H]

Thanks guys, I'm trying a bit of everything

[DocLotus]

Hi Uwe;

All JPEG's.

At the 1000 x 1000 final file size runs from a low of 37K to a high of 400K.  There is only one 400K.  Most are in the 100 - 200K range.

The reason for the various sizes is due to the complexity of the cover art.  A simple cover will scan small & a complex cover will scan larger.

The original 2000 x 2000 image scan will be very large in the order of 900K - 3MB or so.  Don't let that worry you as the size will shrink as you resize the image to 1000 x 1000 (or whatever size you want).  Also when I save the final image I find that using the maximum JPEG compression (or your software may say something like minimum size) that I can not see any degradation in the final image from the before compression image.

So... decreasing size to 1000 x 1000 after the initial scan, then using max JPEG compression the final image ends up in the  100K - 200K range.

I'm also doing all my DVD covers & inserts... That's another story.


>>> It appears a little bit whimsical to me, that thousends of scanners scan the same CD Covers...
 <<<

True, but I have found that most scans form the Internet are of poor quality for my preference so i do them myself & have complete control over the final quality.

As I said before ...

* Had to hunt around through many sites to find rare or out of print CD covers.

* Many covers did not match the actual cover on my CD (many were taken from vinyl records which sometimes have a different, or slightly different, cover or were European or Asian versions for the cover art... I live in the States).

* The scanning of the covers were sometimes less then professional (poor image quality, poor color match, low resolution, etc.)

* Also it is amazing that I could not find some covers & that some did not match my CD at all.

[johnfriend]

I use MusicMatch to collect cover art.  It does an excellent job.  

I LOVE MC9 and HATE MM.  But I keep MM on my computers JUST to collect album covers.  MM does a MUCH better job than anything I've discovered in MC9.

I had 6 albums I needed art for last week.  MC9 found just 1... MM found all 7!!  MM even will give you a choice of covers if the song was on more than 1 album. (like a greatest hits album)

Check it out!

[jleerigby]

I had 6 albums I needed art for last week.  MC9 found just 1... MM found all 7

Well I got tired of MMJB but that is some feature!  Was it a 'buy 6 get 1' free offer?