No I don't have a copy of Virgin Killer

January 12, 2011 3:19 AM

What's the best program to use to quickly and automatically add album art to my mp3 collection?

It's been a while since this was asked so I'll go for it again in the hope there's now a better solution. Everything I've come up with so far seems slow and clunky. I have a 350GiB+ music collection so the solution has to be automatic.

Snowflake details:

iTunes and WMP are NOT an option
Speed is important
Standalone executable is highly preferred to an installer
Similarly, smaller, faster, more lithe programs are preferred
I already have Winamp installed

posted by turkeyphant to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Depending on how organized your collection is, I've found Album Art Downloader to be extremely efficient for dealing with several hundred albums at a time. I believe it also can be set up for Automatic Image Downloading.
posted by ktrey at 3:25 AM on January 12, 2011

It's not exactly quick, but Picard from the MusicBrainz project will do this. Note that if you let it it will also go to town retagging all your music. In my experience this is usually a good thing, but YMMV!
posted by pharm at 3:32 AM on January 12, 2011

Are all of your mp3s tagged with the album name already?
posted by soelo at 5:47 PM on January 12, 2011

Response by poster: ktrey: I've used Album Art Downloader in the past but hoped there would be something faster and more automated out now.

pharm: I have tags set up in the way that I prefer - it's not acceptable to have all that work overwritten. And although I like the idea of Picard, I don't think it's what I'm looking for here.

soelo: Yes, all are fully tagged.
posted by turkeyphant at 3:17 AM on January 13, 2011

Time to write some python then? ID3 & Amazon query libraries already exist, you just need to tie them together...
posted by pharm at 3:44 AM on January 13, 2011