Replacement for "Album Art Aggregator"?

Posted by: jbauer

Replacement for "Album Art Aggregator"? - 03/02/2010 18:04

Hi All,

I used to LOVE AAA, but it's now unsupported and no longer working.

I need to find a replacement. All I want to do is to find album art and save it as cover.jpg in the correct folder. I don't want/need to write the art to the tag.

I found this: http://maa.codeplex.com/ - supposed to be inspired by AAA, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work.

I've tried to get MediaMonkey to do it, but that software is buggy and doesn't do it correctly either.

Any links or advice would be appreciated!

- Thanx
- Jon
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Replacement for "Album Art Aggregator"? - 03/02/2010 20:38

How about CoverSearch?

I think Amarok will do it, too.

There's a somewhat old list here.
Posted by: JBjorgen

Re: Replacement for "Album Art Aggregator"? - 04/02/2010 15:19

I use Media Monkey. It stores the art in the ID3 tag. It then shows up as it should when imported into iTunes or other software or hardware players. Much neater than storing it separately. It uses Amazon as a source for album art.

In the options you can configure it to save the image to the album folder instead


EDIT: oops. I see you've already tried Media Monkey. Works great for me. Obviously YMMV
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: Replacement for "Album Art Aggregator"? - 04/02/2010 15:32

The problem with all the solutions I've seen so far is that they rely on low-resolution sources. Usually only one source at that.

Amazon has a spotty database of album art. Some new albums have super high res versions which Amazon doesn't normally let you download (easy to get around) but mostly Amazon's offerings max out at 500x500.

The iTunes store has a huge about of album art, but generally you have to go through iTunes to get it. Easy to do and on a Mac it's super easy to embed or save the album art out to files. Dimensions vary, but generally at least 600x600.

Sites like AllCDCovers have a lot of high resolution covers, but there aren't any programs out that siphon from there as far as I know. The site(s) also generally implement some form of anti-leaching mechanism - captcha, IP-based time-outs, etc.

RateYourMusic.com also has a lot of album art and it varies greatly in dimensions. Sometimes it's the only place you'll find something online though. Then there's also Discogs.net

Lastly, if you have a scanner and some time, you can scan your own. But time is definitely the big factor here because you'll also have to descreen the image to make it look half-way decent.

I use iTunes, RateYourMusic, Discogs, AllCDCOvers and of course my scanner for when I can't easily just download the image with high enough quality (or at all).
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Replacement for "Album Art Aggregator"? - 04/02/2010 17:12

Sadly, there used to be a way to get iTunes images. Not entirely sure why Apple turned it off.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: Replacement for "Album Art Aggregator"? - 04/02/2010 17:21

Yeah, too bad, because when you download with iTunes directly, I don't believe you ever get 1400x1400+ images.

Seems like someone needs to run wireshark and find out exactly what's different in the current download process.