Cover Art

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Cover art, also known as "album art" or "album artwork", is artwork that provides a visual representation of a release. Normally it refers to the front of the release packaging, but the Cover Art Archive can store images of the back of the release packing, of the media itself, and of many other pieces — right down to the sticker on the shrinkwrap.

In MusicBrainz website display

As cover art has legal licensing and copyright issues associated, MusicBrainz can display cover art only from the Cover Art Archive, approved cover art sites, linked to by a cover art relationship or ASIN relationship.

In media files

Media players that support cover art display do so in several ways, often supporting more than one mechanism. Images can be:

  • stored within the media player's own internal library/database
  • stored as a separate file in the same folder/directory as the release, using a naming convention (e.g. folder.jpg)
  • embedded within each track's metadata info (e.g. ID3).

Picard supports the 2nd and 3rd option when used with the cover art plugin, listed on Picard Plugins.

Usage

We welcome your contribution of cover art images. See How to Add Cover Art for instructions. See Cover Art Types for a list of pieces of the release (e.g. Front, Back, Medium, Obi, etc.) with which images can be labelled.

To add cover art to a digital file using the Picard tagger application, see the Cover Art Plugin description at Picard Plugins.