How much effort do you put into album art for your digital files?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Pizza, Dec 29, 2016.

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  1. Pizza

    Pizza With extra pepperoni Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Are you satisfied with what gets plopped in when you rip a CD or do you take extra steps? My wife used to not care if her files even had an image. Now she cares. Album Exchange was a nice discovery from posts I've read here but they don't have everything, most scans are great but a few of their scans fall short. Discogs is very hit or miss.

    I've often scanned my own CDs. Right now I'm scanning all my CD singles and getting rid of the blurry, dark, grayish ones I've found online in the past. Being a digital artist, I'll go through great lengths re-assembling an album cover. I'll also creat custom art for stray tracks that get put together.

    The poll allows multiple picks.
     
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  2. Curveboy

    Curveboy Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York City
    I google image search...works 90% of the time. Sometimes you have to crawl though the depths of the internet to find what you are looking for.

    While I never had an issue with artwork showing on my iPod or Windows Phone, now that I'm on Android almost none of my art shows up.
     
  3. ibanez_ax

    ibanez_ax Forum Resident

    I'm real anal about having the best quality cover art when I rip to JRiver. If the cover art is poor quality after a rip, I'll try to find a better image. I'll scan the cover as a last resort.
     
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  4. detroit muscle

    detroit muscle MIA

    Location:
    UK
    I like to keep art as original as I can, but it's fun to have art like a turquoise Led Zeppelin I and a script Born To Run. I do like making my own art for hits or rarities compilations.
     
  5. Khamakhazee

    Khamakhazee Forum Resident

    Location:
    Canada
    I do an image search and JRiver has it built in. I try and find 500x500 size or better but less than 500KB in size.
     
  6. lemonade kid

    lemonade kid Forever Changing

    If I don't like what the official CD has, I often add or embellish, especially if the band's name or album title is not present. Some that I can't find art for, I create my own from photos or with iTunes or photoshop. Gotta have an image when I listen!...it's the artist in me I guess.

    Something created for a self compiled DVD and personal iTunes player

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Dec 29, 2016
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  7. egebamyasi

    egebamyasi Forum Resident

    Location:
    Worcester, MA
    I rarely use digital files anymore but when I did it would drive me nuts if a song didn't have the proper album art.
     
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  8. Gaslight

    Gaslight ⎧⚍⎫⚑

    Location:
    Northeast USA
    Depends on the album. I have an office printer with a large flatbed scanner.....so I do scan album art and color-correct them, doesn't take me long.

    CD's I generally don't do that if I can find a decent sized image online (600x600 is fine for my purposes). But if it's something rare / hard to find then here comes the scanner.

    I scan liner notes as well, but just the ones I may actually read. Helps these days given my older eyes - easier to zoom in on a tablet versus pulling out the magnifying glass.
     
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  9. Gaslight

    Gaslight ⎧⚍⎫⚑

    Location:
    Northeast USA
    I haven't had a problem with Android / Google Play Music. I generally embed the JPG and I know some apps have a problem with the progressive option in JPG's so I don't use it.
     
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  10. Curveboy

    Curveboy Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York City
    Yeah, I embed all my artwork and I'd say only about 25% of it is showing on Android. Oh well...
     
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  11. I go directly to search engines. They often offer better quality scans than I'm able to make myself. I'm not good with things like photoshop, so creating my own is usually not an option. Also, if I own a digital file it's almost certain that I don't own the CD.
     
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  12. MYQ1

    MYQ1 Forum Resident

    600 X 600 jpeg album cover found via Google for every CD & nothing else.
    Larger pics get edited down.
     
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  13. David G.

    David G. Forum Resident

    Location:
    Austin, TX
    I'm working on this right now... I always want a high-resolution image with my digital files, so I try to find a 1500x1500 image using a search engine, Amazon, or Allmusic (occasionally others). If none can be found that are 500x500 or larger, I'll scan it myself, but I try to avoid that as I don't keep the scanner hooked up to the computer when I'm not using it.
     
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  14. karmaman

    karmaman Forum Resident

    half the time i'll scan the CD art as i like the image to match the copy i've ripped especially when i have 2 or more editions of the same title. but if i can find an accurate hi-res option online i'll go with that.
     
  15. ivan_wemple

    ivan_wemple Senior Member

    This is precisely what kills me, time-wise. I'm anal about artwork quality (I use 600 x 600 images, only, and will Photoshop meticulously if I need to improve the quality of the best image I can find), but ... if a track is pulled from a Various Artists compilation (for example), I need to assign artwork, for that track, from the album it originally appeared on, not from the compilation. Ugh. I wish I was less fastidious about this stuff.
     
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  16. bunglejerry

    bunglejerry Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto, ON
    The only time I even bother with cover art is if I'm making some kind of "compilation" and then I like to design my own.

    Otherwise I couldn't care less. I frequently strip out the cover art.
     
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  17. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I go to specialty websites, use search engines, and, if I have to, i'll scan my own CD or album covers. On occasion, i'll use Photoshop to modify an existing image to look more like the original.

    My goal is to get covers that look as close to the original vinyl release as possible. With albums that have multiple variations, i'll pick the one that gets closest to what I had.
     
  18. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Also try an app called Album Art Downloader.
     
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  19. PineBark

    PineBark formerly known as BackScratcher

    Location:
    Boston area
    I insist on decent quality album art. When I rip CDs using dBPoweramp, about half of the time the automatically chosen art is acceptable. When it's not, I'll do a Google image search or just scan the hardcopy myself.
     
  20. Weirdomusic

    Weirdomusic Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Netherlands
    Yep, same here. I want good quality, but I also want the "correct" art if I have multiple versions of albums (like the mono and stereo versions, or a cd rip and a vinyl rip).

    I usually start with Google Image Search and I'm constantly amazed at the extreme differences in colours and quality, even for well known albums by major artists. Whenever possible I try to use "official" artwork from the artists' website, but even that can prove tricky.

    As you can imagine I also spend a lot of time making sure the rest of the metadata are correct ;-)
     
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  21. gregorya

    gregorya I approve of this message

    I make sure I have the cover of the album, but I intentionally avoid high resolution images as they take more room and in some cases seem to bog down the performance of some dedicated portable music devices. If I really want to appreciate the artwork, I just take the CD/album off the shelf.

    I also prefer to listen to music with my eyes closed, so it's really not a big issue... that said, if the artwork is missing or incorrect, it bothers me... further evidence that at times I can be an idiot... :)
     
  22. detroit muscle

    detroit muscle MIA

    Location:
    UK
    I enjoy deluxe editions were you get 2 CD's. I try to make the bonus discs different but linked to the original album. For example The 2nd disc of Sticky Fingers has the Spanish cover and all the Elvis Costello ones were great to do as he had lots of great graphics for all his various releases.
     
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  23. mmars982

    mmars982 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pittsburgh, PA
    Album Art Exchange, then Google image search if they don't have it. Only one or two albums in my collection did I need to scan the cover because I could not find anything online that matched. I need to have album art for all of my digital files. Really bothers me if I don't.
     
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  24. Jeff Kent

    Jeff Kent Forum Resident

    Location:
    Mt. Kisco, NY
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  25. Anachostic

    Anachostic Forum Resident

    I'm ok with what EAC pulls from Amazon as long as the image is around 500x500. If not, I do an image search. For a lot of my more obscure CDs, I scan the covers at high DPI, clean them up and post them for others to find on my Flickr account (Album Art »). I do insist that the digital files have the same cover as my CD, for the ones that are re-released with a new cover.
     
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