What Resources Do You Use To Add Quality Album Artwork To Your Digital Library?

Do you care about the quality of the album artwork added to your digital library or is anything you get okay with you? If you do like to seek out the best artwork available for album artwork what are the tools and resources you use to find it. I use several as sometimes there are titles that are simply not easy to find a quality cover. My preference is a size of 1000 x 1000 with as high a dpi as possible

• Album Art Exchange - this is a well know resource with lots of quality titles and it is still my initial go to tool
• iTunes Get Artwork - I had stayed away from using this as most artwork I originally felt was inferior. However I had noticed that the quality and size of what has been used on iTunes has improved. I do always make sure I embed that artwork and don't just leave it linked to iTunes
• Tidal - I'm not sure how I came across this but Tidal provides an abundance of great artwork but requires a little work to get it. When you are on an album page select the album artwork. The next window will have a smaller icon of that artwork and some credits information. Select the small artwork icon again and a much larger image will appear by itself. Now do a screen capture of that image. You will end up with a high quality file that is approximate 1300 x 1300 at 144dpi. It will be a PNG file. I export that to JPEG into the folder I want to work from, downloads, covers, etc and them embed that with the file. This is great for old and new covers.
• Google Images - a simple search on Google Images for album covers with the tools modified to only include Large images (typically 1000 x 1000 or larger) has render decent results.
• AMG - some AMG images of covers will enlarge when selected and a provide a result in the 1000 x 1000 result range but it is hit and miss.

Through those efforts I have been quite successful in getting the quality artwork I like to display for my digital library.

What other resources do you use?

 

Amazon.

 

I deeply care about the quality of my images, but I have a different preference than you. I care more about colour richness than resolution. For that, a 500x500 cover is enough if it has a great colour rendition and is evenly lit. For record covers of the analogue era, I like this site:

www.eil.com

They’re an online record store, but you can browse items that are not available anymore, and especially their older scans with the more vibrant colours are excellent.


iTunes Get Artwork and Tidal are great tips for digital-era artwork, indeed.

 

Personal pictures (the vinyl cover, the record, etc.) and the Mp3tag.exe for Windows.

 

Amazon, Discogs or Album Art Exchange. My dbpoweramp will import fairly decent album art (800x800) if I am ripping a CD about 50% of the time. Album Art Exchange is the best for quality.

 

I have a scanner and the necessary skills.

Dpi only tells you the pixel density when printed on paper. You can set it as high or low as you like. The image will not change.

 

Discogs is good sometimes for a really rare item. A quad reel, or a rare 45 picture sleeve.

Tag & Rename is my preferred tagging program to fix things that need touch up or new art to replace old art. But the old version I have does not handle dsf files, those need to be done in JRiver media center. Or I could buy newer version of T&R that does dsf files.

dBpoweramp is my preferred ripper to add artwork in the first place. For needle drops I like to scan my own covers at 600dpi and then reduce to 300 before converting to jpg.

But yeah I hate it when art is so bad you can’t read any of the text in the cover.

 

Dpi is the image resolution, I’ve never heard anyone say it has no effect unless the picture is printed on paper. But whatever!

 

You can set an image with 1000x1000 px to 72 or 300dpi for example, but they are both 1000x1000 px.
1000 px at 72 dpi equals 13.9 inches, 1000 px at 300 dpi equals 3.4 inches.

 

We are assuming the same inch size here, not a flexible variable of course. Then you find DPI is resolution, ok.

 

Jazz

Birka Jazz - Vinyl LP Jazz Records - Rare and Collectable

There's also a Japanese collector who has/had an amazing site of original vinyl cover art. I used it for all my Blue Note digital albums. I've posted it here before, but can't seem to find it at the moment.

 

Color accuracy is a prime interest of mine also. I find many are either overly saturated with color or you will see a lot where the grays are tinted with magenta or cyan or even have a yellow caste.

 

dBpoweramp is my ripping tool and on occasion I find artwork selected their to be excellent but mostly when I see something I think I like and compare it to the art I found elsewhere about 95% of the time I do select the art from other sources.

 

I view artwork as being pretty much the same as tagging data, if quality is important, I do it by hand. IOW, I scan it myself from my own covers. Most of the time 'pedestrian' is good enough, so I'll grab whatever off of Discogs. I used to use AAX long ago, but they banned me based on my ISP saying only "bad" people use HughesNet. Now that I've got a different ISP, I should try them again.

But, I've often times wondered why album art is so freely exchanged. Aren't the efforts of graphic design companies, like Hypnosis, worth anything? Haven't the record companies invested in visual art as well as auditory art? Why aren't album covers copyrighted to protect this art and investment? That could provide the music industry with more revenue, of which they cry about all the time. Then they could threaten lawsuits over sharing artwork, and shut down sites that freely make it available to the public. Thus, fulfilling the public's image of them that they themselves (the musing industry) have created (a big lumbering bully).

 

No, we can't assume that. Were talking about applying different dpi settings to a 1000 x 1000 px image. The number of pixels is fixed, so size is a variable in this case.

You could also take a 1000 x 1000 px, 300 dpi image and scale it down to 72 dpi by reducing the number of pixels. In that case the dimensions would remain the same, but the resulting image would only have 240 x 240 px.

 

Talking my own scans, the ones I scanned.

 

I scan my own and adjust the color on a calibrated AW3418. This is mostly because for jazz and classical most of the images on the web aren't great quality; either in terms of color or resolution.

I keep the unresized images, for folder view I do 900 width.

 

You adjust the color of your scans because the ones on the web are not so hot?

 

Windows PaintBox, given me real control over my scans. For instance, here's my upgrade of Rundgren's 1974 album, Todd:


Oddly enough, it turned out very similar to McCartney II...

 

Perfect Tunes, which is a separate program but part of the dbPoweramp bundle, is quite good. Actually works much better than the functionality in the dbPoweramp CD ripper.

 

My first port of call is normally Google and search Artist / Album and add fanart. This often, but not always brings up excellent art work at 1000x1000, but sometimes 240x240. I keep the 1000x1000 pixel size, but reduce the file size to 300Kb in dBpoweramp, CD Ripper settings. I always funeso regularly use the offered PerfectTUNES art from CD Ripper.

Recently added Album Art Exchange.

If none of the above produce the goods, I'll scan the cover.

Edit. The reason I chose 300Kb, is because a well known player, I believe doesn't display if you use greater than 320Kb.

 

Mostly I use Album Art Exchange and if no luck there, my meta data software (Metadatics) can find it most of the time.

 

Instead of doing a screen capture, use the Inspect Element function, locate the file link, and save the linked image.

 

For older vinyl, many of them are still better than the labels' official efforts, which are often too washed out, desaturated and/or with unnatural skin tones.

 

I use Google to find the images, and just use Preview on my Macbook to edit them. I almost always play with the exposure, shadowing, saturation, etc. to get good color and contrast etc.