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.

(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.

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

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.

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).

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).

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!).