Album Cover Art Downloader

As of April 2008, Amazon has deprecated the 3.0 version of their web services API. The Linux version of Album Cover Art Downloader has been updated to work with the new Amazon API, but the Windows is yet to be fixed. Until a new Windows version is uploaded, the Amazon image source will not work on Windows.

Here's a program that will semi-automatically download album cover images for your music collection. All you have to do is point it at the root of your music directory and for each directory, the program will download a set of corresponding (well, best guess) album covers from the Internet, from which you can choose one that suits your fancy.

See how the program works from a flash demonstration video.

Currently supported image providers:

• Yahoo! Images
• Wal-Mart
• Buy.com

At least the following programs make use of the cover images:

• KDE, GNOME and others that follow the FreeDesktop.org .desktop-entry spec
• Windows XP Explorer
• Windows Media Player 9+
• CDcover, an XMMS plugin
• CoverViewer, another XMMS plugin.
• wmalbum, a WindowMaker dock applet
• Various WinAMP plugins, for example Cover TAG.

In addition, some portable music players can show the cover image if it is embedded in the MP3 file.

Source version requirements

The standalone versions are completely self-contained, and thus require no prior Python installation or any further dependencies. Just extract them to some directory and you're good to go. The standalone packages were made with McMillan Enterprises, Inc.'s excellent Installer. The Windows installer was made with InnoSetup.

In order to run the source packages you'll need:

• Python 2.3 or better with python-xmlbase.
• QT >= 2.3 or >= 3.1 and PyQT, the Python bindings.
• Python Imaging Library
• GNU make

On Debian the following command should get you rolling in a jiffy:

# apt-get install python-qt3 python-imaging

Usage

Check out the tutorial to get started.

Internals

The cover images are in one or more of the following places:

• folder.jpg for Windows XP
• .folder.png and an Icon entry in .directory for Konqueror, etc.
• ID3v2 APIC frame, which is embedded into the MP3 files.
• Additional custom image targets are supported