Add Album Art to ID3 Tags

Many MP3 players can display album art for a track if the art is embedded in the ID3 tag. Use the Album Cover Art Downloader tool to automate the process of adding cover art to your MP3s.

In this age of digital media and purchasing music from the Internet, there are still a few nice things about buying an actual CD. One of these things is the fact that a CD comes with album art. Album art not only can give you interesting photos of your favorite band and often song lyrics, but the cover of the album itself creates a distinctive look that you can use to identify the CD. Album art is popular even for MP3s, and a number of players can display album art that has been embedded in the ID3 tag. This hack will tell you how to use the aptly named Album Cover Art Downloader program to, well, download album cover art and add it to your ID3 tags.

The first step is to download and install Album Cover Art Downloader (called albumart for the rest of the hack). Go to the official web site at http://louhi.kempele.fi/~skyostil/projects/albumart and click on the link to the latest release. There you can download precompiled RPMs or DEB packages for your Linux distribution or, alternatively, you can download and build the source. To use albumart, you will need Python 2.3 or greater, QT 2.3 or greater (or QT 3.1 or greater), PyQT the QT Python bindings, and the Python Imaging Library.

Tip

Debian users can get these dependencies quickly. Just type:

	# apt-get install python-qt3 python-imaging ...

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