Cover Art Archive

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Introduction

The Cover Art Archive is a cooperation between the Internet Archive and MusicBrainz that aims to level the playing field for music cover art. Currently, there is no central repository of music cover art (e.g. the images of Audio CD covers) that is freely and easily accessible. The Cover Art Archive aims to fix this situation by creating a collection of cover art that is stored on the Internet Archive's servers and curated by the MusicBrainz community. The images for any release (e.g. an Audio CD) are indexed by MusicBrainz Release Id (MBID) and can be fetched by constructing a URL that is based on the MBID.

URL Structure

To construct the URL for the front cover for a release with a given MBID, replace [MBID] in the URL below with the MBID of the release:

 http://archive.org/download/mbid-[MBID]/mbid-[MBID]-front.jpg

For example, to fetch the cover art of Portishead's Dummy CD Audio, which has the MBID of 8f468f36-8c7e-4fc1-9166-50664d267127, you construct the following URL:

 http://archive.org/download/mbid-8f468f36-8c7e-4fc1-9166-50664d267127/mbid-8f468f36-8c7e-4fc1-9166-50664d267127-front.jpg

Then all you need to do is an HTTP GET on that URL to download the cover art. If you get a Not Found (404) error, this release does not have cover art in MusicBrainz. Note: The MBID is repeated in the URL because these cover art images are part of the normal Internet Archive collection and their naming convention is friendly to their visitors who might download individual images via their web browser. In order to allow the user to save multiple images to a directory on their own computer without overwriting existing files, each of the files names should be unique.