How to get cover art for your Android device's music collection
Whether your music collection is vast and diverse or small and narrowly focused, it's nice to have something to look at other than your music player's default image while you're jamming. Album Art Grabber is a free app for Android that makes it easy to clean up your music library's cover images. Here's how to use it.
There are plenty of reasons why your music library may have incomplete album cover art, but they all add up to a series of petty annoyances that can drive some of us insane. If you die a little inside each time the default image pops up instead of the proper album cover, take heart--here's one free, easy way to find and download most missing of your art to your Android mobile device automatically.
- Install the Album Art Grabber app and start it up.
- It will scan your library for albums, and then show you each album and the cover art associated with it, if any. The first time you run AAG (or if you've just loaded a bunch of new albums onto your device), it's best to just click "Grab" at the bottom left. This tells it to search for missing art, and it might take a while on your first pass. In general it doesn't take very long even for sizable collections, though.
- You can review each album cover if you like. At least a few are likely to still be missing covers, or (less likely) to have the wrong art. Select any album to bring up search options. In the following example, we replace an incorrect album for The Roots' "Rising Down."
- The app lets you search the Last.fm or MusicBrainz databases or your SD card; the searches can be rather loose, so you may need to dig for the few that AAG can't find automatically.
If you have a few stragglers that aren't in the available databases, you can always search online, save the image file to your SD card, and have AAG look there. It's a small price to pay for sanity.