Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

The sorry state of album art grabbers on OS X

I

illjazz

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 18, 2008
227
2
I'm about to give up. I'm having a hard time believing there is no good, free OR paid, STILL SUPPORTED app for grabbing high quality album art for OS X out there. I searched for "album art" on I Use This and ended up with this result: http://osx.iusethis.com/search?page=1&order=users&q=album+art

I went through the whole list. Now, those apps for which the download link isn't straight up broken and that can be launched are horribly unstable. They either crash or just don't work. Not a single one of them that I've seen has even been updated in 2008. They're all old and it seems like none of them are being developed/supported/looked after anymore. iTunes itself doesn't quite cut it for finding album art because it gives me zero options on what album art to pick and also has trouble finding a lot of album art, even for not-so-obscure albums that I own.

Now, I thought I found the app that comes as close to perfect as it's gonna get: Art Collector. Even though the last release came out in 2006 (I think) and development is decidedly dead, (heck, even the website, while pretty, is basically broken.. go browse around a bit), it used to work quite well. However, I reinstalled OS X two days ago and now it doesn't work at all. I can launch it, it still finds album art, but when I drag it to my albums, it simply doesn't save it. It's just logically broken.

I must repeat that I am having a very hard time believing that there are no apps in OS X land that occupy this space successfully.. that get the album-art-fetching job done right, done beautifully and done reliably, as we're used to from good OS X software. You'd think this is a pretty huge market (note to self: learn Cocoa/Mac programming and write the damn app yourself) considering how many people, er, listen to music/use iTunes?

Anyone have any suggestions?

What I loved about Art Collector (when it worked) is that it found a bunch of album art images for each album selected and let ME CHOOSE the one I wanted. It very handily showed the dimensions of each image and even labeled images with dimensions close to 500 x 500 with "HD". Art Collector is close to perfect. It could use some work on the UI and I wouldn't mind being able to get bigger previews of the images.. but that's about all I'd change. Too bad it stopped working.
 
I usually go looking (google images) for individual "problem" album covers and do it by hand, it sucks! :mad:

I don't understand why we (as web users) can't submit album artwork to these CDDB-type services? I own a scanner and a lot of original covers, I would be happy to donate my scan for the web community, why can't I? I understand there would have to be additional support, as in approval of incoming submissions...

Seems like a no-brainer? What am I missing? :confused:
 
TwinCities Dan said:
I usually go looking (google images) for individual "problem" album covers and do it by hand, it sucks! :mad:

I don't understand why we (as web users) can't submit album artwork to these CDDB-type services? I own a scanner and a lot of original covers, I would be happy to donate my scan for the web community, why can't I? I understand there would have to be additional support, as in approval of incoming submissions...

Seems like a no-brainer? What am I missing? :confused:
Click to expand...
Check out this Lifehacker post: http://lifehacker.com/397258/find-and-embed-album-art-in-your-mp3-collection

There's a bunch of websites out there that are all about album art. It's possible some of them have what you're looking for. I suppose I could go scouring such sites myself looking for album art, but frankly, I'm lazy. I want a beautiful OS X app with a great UI to do it all for me :)

Needless to say, it would also be far more fun that way.
 
illjazz said:
Check out this Lifehacker post: http://lifehacker.com/397258/find-and-embed-album-art-in-your-mp3-collection

There's a bunch of websites out there that are all about album art. It's possible some of them have what you're looking for. I suppose I could go scouring such sites myself looking for album art, but frankly, I'm lazy. I want a beautiful OS X app with a great UI to do it all for me :)

Needless to say, it would also be far more fun that way.
Click to expand...

That link does look interesting, I bookmarked it. I will take a closer look at it later, thanks! :)

ohforfckssake! said:
Something like http://www.albumartexchange.com/ ?
Click to expand...

I appreciate the sugestion but that place is a ghost town (at least for my taste). I would feel like I'm starting with a clean slate... I like the CDDB but why can't I submit? That just doesn't make sense? :confused:
 
TwinCities Dan said:
Dito, good lookin' out! :cool:
Click to expand...
It really is excellent. I bought it within minutes of trialling. It found covers for everything in my collection without problems.. and the ability to search Google Images within the app and then select an image is also amazing. If Amazon doesn't have it, surely SOME site SOMEWHERE on the web must :). The logic is sound and works. I'm quite happy with it :)
 
illjazz said:
It really is excellent. I bought it within minutes of trialling. It found covers for everything in my collection without problems.. and the ability to search Google Images within the app and then select an image is also amazing. If Amazon doesn't have it, surely SOME site SOMEWHERE on the web must :). The logic is sound and works. I'm quite happy with it :)
Click to expand...

Can you tell me, does it actually add the graphic to individual songs or just the album like iTunes does?

I will probably buy it next week...kinda broke at the moment...:(
 
TwinCities Dan said:
Can you tell me, does it actually add the graphic to individual songs or just the album like iTunes does?

I will probably buy it next week...kinda broke at the moment...:(
Click to expand...
Every single song. It can tell you whether an album has a cover assigned to it, but only album-wide as iTunes does, or whether each song has the cover attached to it. Then it can go through and attach the cover to each individual song and will let you know that it has done so. The UI is very intuitive and you'll see at a glance which songs have covers attached and which don't. It's great :)
 
TwinCities Dan said:
That's badass! Have you tried the iSight option? If you can't find artwork online I think you hold a CD in front of your mac and it takes a pict of your CD for iTunes, kinda ghetto but something is better than nothing! Hahaha...
Click to expand...
Frankly no, because, er, I really don't remember the last time I bought a CD. I don't think I own a single CD at the moment. All digital :) Even if I did, that's a bit too ghetto.. haha, but I agree, something is better than nothing. If it came down to using your own covers though, a better option would be to scan them using a flatbed scanner. That would mean an investment though, unless you already have a scanner. It's nice that the option is there to take pics with the iSight but I don't see myself ever using it.
 
illjazz said:
Frankly no, because, er, I really don't remember the last time I bought a CD. I don't think I own a single CD at the moment. All digital :) Even if I did, that's a bit too ghetto.. haha, but I agree, something is better than nothing. If it came down to using your own covers though, a better option would be to scan them using a flatbed scanner. That would mean an investment though, unless you already have a scanner. It's nice that the option is there to take pics with the iSight but I don't see myself ever using it.
Click to expand...

Yup. Which brings me back to my first post, I do own a scanner. Do those other sites (amazon, whatever) allow users to upload art? I don't understand why Apple wouldn't put those other options in iTunes? :confused:
 
TwinCities Dan said:
Yup. Which brings me back to my first post, I do own a scanner. Do those other sites (amazon, whatever) allow users to upload art? I don't understand why Apple wouldn't put those other options in iTunes? :confused:
Click to expand...
Honestly, I don't know. Why do you care, though? Just scan the images in and use them for your own collection.
 
illjazz said:
It really is excellent. I bought it within minutes of trialling. It found covers for everything in my collection without problems.. and the ability to search Google Images within the app and then select an image is also amazing. If Amazon doesn't have it, surely SOME site SOMEWHERE on the web must :). The logic is sound and works. I'm quite happy with it :)
Click to expand...

Finally paid the $20, what a great program! :D :cool:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back