It’s very cute to look at album art while listening to music, and many devices can display those pictures. Album art design is a serious process involving lots of work, so we the listeners should pay respect by at least appreciating that work.
Today, most music download services already include album art in the tags, so nothing to worry about.
But what to do if you started your mp3 collection 17 years ago, when the standard was introduced?
You can add art to you tracks and here’s how.
There’re some automated downloads, but I won’t trust them. First, they sometimes download some very strange pictures, like for an English title you get Chinese tags and art for irrelevant song! Second, they rely on Album tag which is not always present.
If you don’t save tags for some of your songs, which is especially true for singles and other out-of-album tracks, you’ll have to enter them manually.
But if you have to do manual job, it’s better to start with album art right away.
I recommend using Foobar2000 for that. It’s a free and very good music player with lots of options.
You will have to install foo_discogs.dll to it. To do that, just copy foo_discogs.dll to /components/ folder and you’re done.
Now, open each of your track one by one and in you browser, search for the picture suitable for the song. Then download the picture, right click the song in Foobar2000, select Tagging->Attach cover->Front cover, select the file and you’re done. The image will be integrated into the mp3tag, ready to be displayed on any device that allows it.
Yes, that could be a lot of manual operations. But in the process, you can refresh your collection by removing songs you don’t enjoy anymore, correcting tags and redownloading better quality rips for those oldschool 128kbit tracks.
To escape this tedious work in the future, make yourself a rule: each time you add a new song to your collection, make sure you add correct album title and album art to it.