Recursively Download Cover Art For All Folders Containing Mp3 Files, Based On ID3 Tags

Cover Art Downloader (aka "Coverlovin") is a nifty Python script I've been looking for a long time - it traverses a directory containing mp3 files and downloads cover art based on id3 tags of the files in each directory. The images are downloaded from Google Images.

How to use Cover Art Downloader (Coverlovin)

To use Coverlovin, simply point it to a folder - it scans all the mp3 files in each subfolder and downloads the cover art automatically, without any user input. That means that you music should be organized by albums (that way, each image is downloaded into the corresponding album folder). Here's exactly how to do it:

Download the script(s) from Launchpad, and extract it somewhere, let's say in the "coverlovin_1.0" folder in your home directory.

Then, install python-simplejson:

sudo apt-get install python-simplejson

Now, to download the cover art for all the mp3 files in a folder (and subfolders), use the following commands (firstly "cd" into the Coverlovin folder):

cd ~/coverlovin_1.0
./coverlovin.py "/path/to/mp3s/folder"

Where /path/to/mp3s/folder is ... you got the idea. I've used quotes for the above commands in case you have spaces for the path to the mp3s folder.

Coverlovin comes with a few options too: you can specify the image size ("--size=SIZE", where the size can be: small, medium or large), image format ("--image=IMAGE", where IMAGE can be jpg, png or gif), image name ("--name=NAME") and more - you can see all the available options by running coverlovin.py without any options ("./coverlovin.py").

YaRock - A Music Player Designed For Browsing Your Music Collection Based On Album Cover Art

(YaRock 0.0.28 album view)

YaRock is a new QT4 music player designed to provide a nice overview of your music by allowing you to browse your music collection based on the album cover art. Thanks to its multiple views: album, artist, track, genre or folder view, you can easily find an artist or album even with a large music collection (and if that's not enough, you can always use the built-in search). Depending on the view you're using, you can drag a whole album or just some tracks to the playlist on the right.

YaRock can fetch albums cover art from Last.fm or you can load it from a file - but unfortunately you must do this manually for each album. Hopefully an automatic way of doing this will be implemented in the future.

YaRock's main purpose is not to have a huge list of features, but to allow you to browse your music collection in a clear, visual pleasing way so don't expect too many features, at least not for now. The current features include:

• Music collection database (SQLite 3)
• Browse your local music collection (by artists, albums, genre)
• Easy search and filter music collection
• Manage favorites item (album, artist)
• Play music from Collection or Playlist
• Simple Playlist
• Support MP3, Ogg Vorbis,FLAC music files
• Download missing album cover art from Last.fm
• Clean and simple user interface

(YaRock artist view)

In my test, YaRock worked quite well, except for a visual glitch for the track, collection and playlist info display (at the bottom of the player - you can notice this in the screenshots) but that's not something major. What I would like is last.fm/libre.fm scrobbling and options to save/load playlists. Once YaRock gets these features, it will become a great lightweight music player.

Unfortunately I don't know how YaRock works on a large music collection because I am in the process of copying my music collection from some old hard disks to my new hard disk, so I only have around 1000 music files on my computer at the time I'm writing this post.

Download YaRock 0.0.28

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat:

• 32bit
• 64bit

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx:

• 32bit
• 64bit

Or you can add the LFFL PPA and install it from there: for Ubuntu Lucid or Maverick.

Thanks to LFFL for the .debs and heads up on YaRock!

Rhythmbox Album Art Search Plugin Ubuntu PPA

Zedtux, who also maintains a PPA for the Rhythmbox FolderView plugin we wrote about last week, sent us a tip about a new PPA he maintains for the Rhythmbox Album Art Search plugin.

The Album Art Search plugin for Rhythmbox automatically searches the web for album covers of each song you play. Rhythmbox can already fetch album art, but using this plugin you can choose which image to use and also it allows you to make an advanced search to find a better images. Once you've set an image as an album cover using this plugin, the image will be stored in ~/.cache/rhythmbox/covers

Rhythmbox Album Art Search uses Google Image Search to fetch the images, based on the artist and album name.

Install Rhythmbox Album Art Search plugin in Ubuntu

To install this plugin in Ubuntu (available for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, 10.04 Lucid Lynx and 10.10 Maverick Meerkat), all you have to do is copy/paste the following commands in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zedtux/rhythmbox-albumartsearch
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugin-albumartsearch

You can then enable it in Rhythmbox under Edit > Plugins > Album Art Search Panel.

Hopefully Zedtux will soon also create a PPA with all the Rhythmbox plugins he maintains so it's even easier to install them all at once (I've sent him an email regarding this by the way).

Thanks to Zedtux for the PPA and tip!

Cover Thumbnailer 0.7 Is Out, Now Works On Fedora, Mandriva And Other Distributions

Cover Thumbnailer (which we've covered before) is a small Python script which displays music album covers in Nautilus, preview of pictures which are in a folder and more. Since we last wrote about it, Cover Thumbnailer got a GUI, and the latest version 0.7 which was released today finally brings support for other (than Ubuntu) Linux distributions.

Changes in Cover Thumbnailer 0.7:

• The install script now works on Fedora, Mandriva and other distributions
• New options avalables
• New translations (English, Danish, French, Polish, Russian and Spanish)

There is now also a PPA available for Ubuntu users. To add it, paste this in a terminal:

-for Ubuntu Lucid and Karmic

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flozz/flozz

-for Ubuntu Jaunty:

sudo bash -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/flozz/flozz/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 75034BEC

Then, install it with:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install cover-thumbnailer

After installing it, restart Nautilus:

nautilus -q

Once installed, you can find it under: System > Preferences > Cover Thumbnailer.

For older Ubuntu versions, source code and more info can be found on the Cover Thumbnailer homepage or it's Gnome-Look page.

Nautilus CoverChooser Script Automatically Downloads Music Album Covers [Ubuntu]

CoverChooser is a really nice Nautilus script which searches for albumart on the internet and downloads it to the selected folder. By applying the script to a music folder, it uses the metadata to get the album info, then uses the Last.fm, Discogs and Amazon web service to download the album art and names it "folder.jpg".

It is great to use with Cover Thumbnailer, an application which automatically sets album art as folder thumbnails in Nautilus (but you must download the album art yourself - Cover Thumbnailer does not download it for you).

Once you have installed CoverChooser, go to Applications > Accessories > CoverChooser so that the script activates in your Nautilus scripts. Then, right click any music album and select Scripts > Cover Chooser.

Please note that to use the Amazon album covers, you will be needing a personal key for Amazon web service. Firstly create an account HERE. Once you have created an account, you can get the key from HERE which you then need to add to the /etc/coverchooser.conf file. To do this, open a terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/coverchooser.conf

(see line 20).


Download CoverChooser (.deb)

How To Download Music Album Covers in Windows and Linux

It's nice for your music collection to have the album covers inside each album folder, so when browsing your folders, you can easily see the albums covers as folders icons, etc. (in Windows, this comes as default, but you can do it in Linux too).

Windows and Linux: Using Album Cover Art Downloader

The first option to download Album covers for both Windows and Linux would be Album Cover Art Downloader, an application which can semi-automatically download album cover images for your music collection. Semi-automatic because you have to manually select each album (if you know a better way of doing this in Windows, please let me know - for Linux there is a better way, read on!).

Note that due to the latest changes in Amazon's Product Advertising API, Album Cover Art Downloader is unable to download any images from Amazon for the time being. However, it can still download album covers from Yahoo! Images, Wal-Mart, Buy.com (don't really understand why the author hasn't used last.fm), so make sure you check all of these in it's settings.

Download Album Cover Art Downloader (Windows .exe, Ubuntu/Debian .deb, Red Hat .rpm and source files available).

Before installing it in Ubuntu/Debian, run this command:

sudo apt-get install python-qt3 python-imaging

Once installed, it won't create a menu item in Linux. So run it in a terminal, like so:

albumart-qt

and then make sure you change Album Cover Art Downloader settings, under Targets > Mp3 Files, make sure you uncheck "Write images to ID3v2 tags":

Linux only

There are two methods of automatically downloading album covers in Linux.

1. If you use Sonata, you can set it to store the cover art it downloads in the album folder instead of ~/.covers. Then, to download the covers you will have to play a song from each album you don't have album art (covers) for.

2. CoverSync - a plugin for Exaile which is needed because Exaile saves the album covers to ~/.exaile/covers/ so basically CoverSync moves the covers from where Exaile saves them, into each album's folder. Unfortunately CoverSync only works with Exaile 0.2x.