The 6 Best Sites to Download High Quality CD Covers
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Music streaming services automatically display album art, but you’re on your own with local music collections. Besides being pleasing to the eye, having the proper CD covers helps you easily identify tracks and makes your collection feel like it’s complete.
Below we have put together some of the best sites to download high quality CD album covers. You can use them to perfect your MP3 collection or just collect your favorite CD cover designs.
Album Art Exchange is a site entirely devoted to high quality album cover images, making it a great resource for anyone interested in album covers.
On his On page, the founder mentions that he started the site because much of the online CD cover was of very poor quality. These images are often plagued by JPEG compression, low contrast, scratches, and scans where someone hasn’t even bothered to remove the CD insert from the case.
As a result, here you will find excellent album cover images for over 600,000 albums. Just search for a specific album (or artist) to find what you’re looking for. Each displays image size, dimensions, and user rating, so you can choose the one that best suits your needs.
Click it Advanced on the search page to change sorting options. You can also use the Change the layout option at the top to display more albums per page.
If you’re not signed in, you’ll see a watermark on your downloads. Create a free account by first using the button on the top right to get unmarked images.
Discogs is one of the must-have resources for online music data. It’s a huge database that collects information on artists, albums, record companies, and more. So it’s no surprise that Discogs also collects album art images.
Start by searching for the album or artist you have chosen using the box at the top. After selecting an album, you will see the image chosen for it at the top left of the page. To select More pictures to see other images related to this album, such as the CD back cover, inserts, special editions and regional variations.
Overall, the images on Discogs are not as high quality as Album Art Exchange. However, the site also contains images of singles, compilations and rarities. If you’re interested in these as well as images outside of the album’s main cover art, there’s something here for you.
Discogs has a lot of information, but MusicBrainz surpasses it in some ways. It’s like an IMDb for music, as it lets you see every place a song has appeared, track music by tags and categories, find a band’s presence on the internet, and much more.
This information can be overwhelming at first, but finding album art with MusicBrainz is pretty straightforward. Search for an artist or album name using the bar at the top right and you will see lots of results. Select the album you are looking for and it will likely show multiple versions from different parts of the world.
You can select a regional version if you want, but it’s usually not necessary. Instead, you can access a high-quality version of the cover art on the right side of the album’s main page.
The above sites should take care of the CD cover needs most of the time. But if you’re looking for something more accessible or can’t find the CD art you want on these pages, there are other options for downloading album art.
One of the best is right under your nose. Amazon sells tons of music and usually features high quality artwork on every album page. Just search for the album you are looking for and you can easily access its art. You will need to right click and choose Open the image in a new tab to get a copy of the image available for recording.
However, there is a little trick to make sure you get the highest quality image when you do this. Make sure you select the Diffusion Where MP3 listed formats because they provide the highest quality images. When you open the album art in a new tab, you get a URL like this:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91isTuBpKXL._SS500_.jpgThe SS500 part of the link means it displays the album art at 500×500 pixels, which is decent but not great. If you change the value after SS, you can set the image resolution, in pixels.
For example, replace SS500 with SS1400 to get this link, which displays a 1400×1400 image:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91isTuBpKXL._SS1400_.jpgWe tested a few albums and found that about 1425 is as high as you can reach before adding a white frame around the image. It may differ from album to album, so try a few values ​​to find the highest quality version possible.
Still can’t find the CD cover you’re looking for? Try to turn to the world’s largest image search platform. There’s a good chance you can find art for just about anything, since Google Images searches the entire web.
You will have to be a bit special when looking on Google Images, as you may find poor quality images. You may want to set the Cut option under Tools To Big to avoid tiny versions of files.
Google Images can find photos of the above sites, so it’s up to you to choose which search interface you prefer.
If you only want to recover a few album art, the above methods work well. But they’re too slow to download dozens or hundreds of CD covers for your collection. When you need to add art to a lot of tracks, you should use a dedicated desktop tool for the task.
One of the best tools for this is MP3tag, which makes it easy to edit music metadata, including album art. Check out our full guide to MP3tag on how to use it.
There are, however, many other choices for CD cover downloads. Take a look at MusicBrainz Picard or Album Art Downloader if MP3tag doesn’t do the job for you.
It’s easy to find quality CD album covers
This list of resources makes it easy to find CD covers for any album in your collection. Whether you’re looking to add appropriate artwork for a rare release or just want to collect high-quality versions of your favorite album art, these sites will provide you with what you need.
If you can’t find the right album art, why not try making your own?
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