Hi-Res album covers

[Remebe]

Hello community!

I want to share with you a useful tool for all of us who like high quality album covers. It is a search engine that allows us to select the artist, the name of the album, the number of pixels and the country of search. Then there is a list of 30 web pages to choose from (only 12 can be selected per search).

Remember that very heavy and large images can delay data loading. Some forum members recommend a size of 1500x1500 pixels and a weight of 500 KB so that they work correctly and look excellent.

Cover Search Engine

Greetings!

[Remo55]

Thanks for the good tip
Remo

[JOHNxxEIRE]

Thanks man, I use this and also “restore” all artwork lol with Photo Editor on an Android phone. I run it through auto contrast and give it some further boost with saturation and brightness so I can to the Rose backlight down to 3!

[Remebe]

You’re welcome, @JOHNxxEIRE

It is for those of us who love to do artisanal work with our music collection, editing tags and improving covers.

[Ben]

I am one of those artisanal workers !

I like to see good quality covers on all devices and use a size of about 1400x1400 and up to 500kb size, perhaps a bit larger for high res. music.

[Remebe]

That’s @Ben!!!

It seems that there are several of us who share the same “problem”. My current standard is 1500x1500 and no more than 500kb. I think it is a good balance between image quality and weight.

Regards

[Jeep]

I agree. I have made professional covers and I was asked 1500 too. It’s a good size that is practical. Often old covers are hard to get a decent scan of. On new digital art (no noise=smaller jpg) is can accept bigger. Good compromise.

[Remebe]

Yes @Jeep, with the old covers there’s a lot of work to do. Unless you find a digital cover of a remastered edition, you need to put hands on.

Regards!

[Jeep]

Lol. I know. I had to find old LPs sometimes to get the best results. But hey, labour of love. I know one of them and they are just lovely people.

Anyway, I find ituch more rewarding to find the original lp covers for my flac files. I like the old fonts and typography and logos. And old Columbia record with a blue WB logo and small sans serif font really is no comparison to the old big bold MONO or STEREO letters. That like a bad form of cultural appropriation (we bought the rights so now it’s ours. Mine. My precious!). If you own a Picasso your not going to add more brush strokes or brush any away, do you?

That’s one more reason I like LPs. Bigger coverart. That’s why I like to see the covers on TV as big as possible. The coverart of some new albums like Björk or Røyksopp are really stunning and a lot bigger than 1500.

[HansM1967]

Nice one to bookmark.

But I have a music collection of about 100000 songs which don’t all have nice album art. What is a good way to collect the art automatically?

I have been looking around but no success thus far. Or does my hifi rose 150b do this automatically? It doesn’t look like it.

Thank for your reply!

Hans from the Netherlands

[joyofmvid]

@HansM1967 For your consideration:

I found “One Tagger” at https://onetagger.github.io/

I’ve not yet tried it. One Tagger is free & the description in the website is impressive. When I get some free time, I plan to give it a test on a well backed up set of audio files

If you try it, let me know the outcome. If this works for you, wow it’ll be a great time saver for the size of your audio library. Thereafter all you need is a listing tool that sorts by metadata tag (e.g., Plex if it can handle the size of your library).

[aswiss]

Roon would let you choose between Roon, Tag or best match. So the highest available resolution is used.

I’ve done my collection manually with MP3Tag - 125000 Titles over the last 10+ years. Lot of work, but I prefer to have it perfect reagarding Tagging. So it does not matter, which Player or Tool you use - all tracks are identified correct and contain a good Album Cover.
I choose a minimum of 600x600, which is sufficient for most of the Players. I found 1500x1500 is too large. Anyone to go with his preference
But its very time consuming.

[Remebe]

Hi Hans!

There are several programs that let you search covers automatically. One example is Songkong (SongKong Music Tagger) but it’s not completely free.

Regards!

[HansM1967]

Thank you all! I am using 'Album Art Dowloader now, with great success!

Hans

[Jeep]

It’s nice to have it done automatically. But 600x600 is really low quality. Unfortunately the Rose streamers don’t really support larger formats but 1500x1500 is what you would want to go for as a standard.

I have made covers professionally so I know what I’m talking about. And remember that 1500x1500 does not mean a large file size if it’s a jpg saved by a proper image app. These file sizes are negligible compared to a lossless music file.

I do advise, if you don’t like the cover quality, or it’s not the correct cover, just Google it and choose ‘images>tools>large’. Often Amazon has the best.

When the music is old-school I like to get the original LP album cover, maybe some wear on it. It takes some clipping, straightening, color correction. But then it looks more authentic. When it comes to modern albums some covers are really high res (Björk for instance). Then I scale them down to 1500 or maybe 2000. File size hardy ever exceeds half a MB.

I do this all on my phone. It’s about a minute per cover. Then tag the flacs with the covers inside (remove doubles). But then I get them the way I like it. And you only need to do it once.

[Bonte]

@Jeep

But 600x600 is really low quality.

Then you’ve already spent enough time editing music.

Just like you, I’ve spent months and years here. I still have a lot of DJ mixes that never had a cover. Then I made some myself.

I also sometimes used YouTube, if the video was in 4k or HD, a screenshot was taken, it was cropped into a square and everything that you did, sharpness, color contrast, image noise etc. etc. was applied and the result looked very good.

Amazon has very good quality and I also used Discogs a lot. For new music as a download, the pictures were OK, but for older music, the cover pictures mostly didn’t look good. But that’s normal, the pictures are all from used records.

Here’s a cover of mine.

A friend made the mix.