I really need to mass tag my library with embedded cover art. I've used mp3tag for years but never the album art.
By the way, a few months ago my mo3tag started writing tags REALLY slow. Not sure what changed or if it's related to my network. Need to check into this more.
I've tried various tag+artwork mechanisms since such things existed, and have ended up with >60K files, most are MP3, but all the good stuff stuff as FLACs.
I am OCD about consistency of which tags I used, and for the covers, I wanted to match all the physical CD inserts and vinyl sleeves. This kind of ruled out the automated (set and forget), batch cover downloads for me as covers vary a lot (e.g, US release vs UK release, remix versions etc). I ended up having to go back and correct! I also wanted embedded cover art to be the same X x Y pixels and of similar visual quality as a JPGs. The tags all needed to be the same ID3 version and APE tags for MP3Gain for me, as I run multiple media players, and multiple DLNA renderers and servers, and you end up with inconsistencies if you don't have a process that always works for all players.
I am probably just weird, but the end result, especially when seem on the pretty Evo front panel, or on a variety of media players, is good.
So, every time I buy an album or several, and rip them, I follow the same process.
- Rename filenames as needed, preceded with track numbers, right caps, right accents, umlauts etc, using NIYW or Bulk Rename Utility.
- Open files in MP3Tag and convert filename->tag filename, tag track, correct genre, correct date etc etc. and remove any pointless tags
- Right click on any
one file in each album in MP3Tag, and run tools->Album art download
- Select the right-looking artwork from the artwork pop-up panel. Usually is Qobuz (Deezer is mostly PNG files for some reason). And it saves a high quality JPG in the album folder.
- Run an "action" to import the art to all selected files, and adjust size to 220 (my preference, no big reason). And save it all.
- For files ripped as MP3's, run MP3Gain, or run FB2k on FLACs to set ReplayGain tags correctly.
- For MP3's, run MP3Diags, to remove any crud and check the files.
All taggers on large numbers of files are slow (even with SSDs), but there was an issue a few years in MP3Tag that made it worse (now gone). Try the latest! Always copy files to local SSD and don't tag to files over a network - faster to copy/move completed files.
Sorry to bore everyone with "Tales from Planet OCD", but I'm happy to explain how to set this all up and make it streamlined, if anyone is curious!