Missing cover art for large imported music libraries.
Apple's Music App (and its predecessor iTunes) has a "Get Album Artwork" feature, but it isn't reliable and doesn't actually embed cover art into your audio files. That means if you move your music library elsewhere, you'll be missing all your album artwork.
Metadata utilities like Metadatics are great (and cheap if not free), but they can require a lot of manual interaction to go through each album and select artwork from search results. This can be forbidding for large libraries of thousands of albums.
This Python package will batch-update your entire library without manual interaction for each album.
It uses Apple Music's artwork, which is already standardized and high-quality. It also embeds the artwork directly into your audio files, so that it's independent of your player.
(* NOTE: Apple Music and other players may not recognize ID3 tags on WAV files.)
pip install belowYou can download this repository from GitHub, or grab it from PyPI using pip:
$ pip install get_cover_artTo upgrade existing installations:
$ pip install --upgrade get_cover_art[python -m] get_cover_art [--path=<path_to_audio_file_or_folder>] [--options]
--path PATH audio file, or folder of audio files (recursive)
artwork options:
--art-size ART_SIZE square dimensions of artwork (default: 500)
--art-quality ART_QUALITY
jpeg compression quality (1-100, default: auto)
--art-dest DEST set artwork destination folder
--art-dest-inline set artwork destination folder to same folders as audio files
--art-dest-filename ART_DEST_FILENAME
set artwork destination filename format. Accepts
{artist}, {album}, {album_or_title}, {filename}, and
{title}. Default is '{artist} - {album_or_title}.jpg'
--external-art-mode {before,after,none}
Use images from local disk: "before" prevents
downloads, "after" downloads as a fallback. Default is none.
--external-art-filename EXTERNAL_ART_FILENAME [EXTERNAL_ART_FILENAME ...]
Filename(s) of folder art to use. Accepts {artist},
{album}, and {title} for replacement: e.g. cover.jpg
or {album}-{artist}.jpg ; this does not affect the filename
for art that must be fetched (use --art-dest-filename for
that).
behavior options:
--test, --no-embed scan and download only, don't embed artwork
--no-download embed only previously-downloaded artwork
--clear clear artwork from audio file (regardless of finding art)
--cleanup remove downloaded artwork files afterward
--force process files regardless of existing artwork
--verbose print verbose logging
--no-skip don't skip previously-scanned files
--throttle THROTTLE number of seconds to wait if request is rejected
filter options:
--skip-artwork SKIP_ARTWORK
(maintained between runs) file listing destination art files to skip
--skip-artists SKIP_ARTISTS
file listing artists to skip
--skip-albums SKIP_ALBUMS
file listing albums to skipif you omit path, it will scan the current working directory
Pro Tip: You can run with --test first, then browse/prune the downloaded artwork, then run again with --no-download to embed only the artwork you didn't prune.
from get_cover_art import CoverFinder
finder = CoverFinder(OPTIONS)
# then you can run either of these:
finder.scan_folder(PATH_TO_AUDIO_LIBRARY)
finder.scan_file(PATH_TO_AUDIO_FILE)OPTIONS is a dict of the same options listed for the commandline, e.g. --verbose -> {'verbose': True}PATH_TO_AUDIO_LIBRARY to default to your current directoryCoverFinder object keeps a list of files_processed, files_skipped, files_failed, files_invalid--force is used), attempts to download from Apple Music based on artist and album metadata.
skip_artwork.txt)--no-skip--no-download or other --skip-* options.The external-art options allow you to fall back on local folder art. Some other scraping systems may have created cover art: for instance, some Kodi scrapers create a "cover.jpg" image in each album directory.
Specifying "--external-art-mode before" will use these existing images, and only download images if there is no existing image. Specifying "--external-art-mode after" will attempt to download artwork as usual, only falling back on the existing images if the download is unable to locate new art.
The "--external-art-filename" option allows you to specify the filename(s) to use for this existing folder art. It defaults to "cover.jpg _albumcover.jpg folder.jpg", which are 3 filenames commonly used by other scraping programs. You can also use bracket formatting with the artist, album, and title fields: for instance, --external-art-filename "{artist}-{album}-cover.jpg" would create filenames such as "The Beatles-Abbey Road-cover.jpg".
The "--art-dest-filename" option allows you to specify the filename used to store downloaded files, for interoperability with other systems. You must be careful to avoid collisions between different albums: The default is "{artist} - {album_or_title}.jpg". If you know that all of the albums you're running against have their own directories and you are using "--art-dest-inline", then you could use something more generic (such as "cover.jpg"). A note about the format:
Pro Tip: If you have a cover.jpg in each album directory, you can use: "--external-art-mode before --external-art-filename cover.jpg --art-dest-inline" and the local images will be used when present (avoiding network lookups). You could also specify "--art-dest-filename cover.jpg" if you want to store the newly downloaded covers in a similar location (again, this is only sane in combination with --art-dest-inline, in cases where each album is stored in a separate directory).
Try re-importing one of your embedded files. If the re-imported version shows artwork, you need to reimport your music library. You can do this without losing your playlists as follows:
Step 6 will take a while.
You'll have to unsync all your music and re-sync it again. Try it with a single file first.