Second trick: If you can’t find good artwork there, Apple does a good job with a huge amount of album artwork, and it’s well indexed in Google Image Search, although the largest you can get is 1200x1200.
Go to Google
Search for your album with “apple” at the end of it, e.g., wagner tannhauser solti apple - then switch to “images” - you will get something like this: wagner tannhauser solti apple - Google Search
Click on Tools, then under “Size,” select “Large”; if Apple has a 1200x1200 version, it will still be in the search results (sometimes the largest they have is 600x600, though)
Click on the album artwork you want
Once it fully loads in the right-hand pane, right-click on it and select “Open Image in New Tab”
Download it from there
Sometimes, I will take the album artwork into other software to spruce it up a bit.
If you have Photoshop, its “Neural Filters” have a fabulous “JPEG Artifacts Removal” tool:
2. If you have a Mac with Pixelmator Pro (which is a bargain), it has a spectacular up-resing algorithm called “Super Resolution” that beats Photoshop’s equivalent - here is a side-by-side closeup of up-resing from 1200x1200 to 1500x1500:
3. Sometimes I will use Photoshop or Pixelmator Pro to spruce up color (using “Curves” to indicate what in the image is supposed to be white will cure a number of issues with color shifts and fading), or I will use a “spot healing brush” (Photoshop bandage icon) or “Repair” (Pixelmator Pro bandage icon) tool to clean up scratches/dust/other issues.
I hope that is useful! I can get most all album artwork I need in good shape using the above techniques.
Nice post.
I have recently been noticing that some of my album artwork outside of Roon is 300x300 and even 200x200 so your tips could be quite helpful in helping me improve this
BTW, secondarily…if a Google search using “apple” as a keyword comes up dry, you can sometimes substitute “spotify” to get something, but this is typically unnecessary, because most everything Spotify has, Apple does, too, at least in the US!
Maybe. But you can find artwork with a resolution of 4000x4000. Especially for the most recent releases. What I usually do is go to music.apple.com, search for the album, copy the link, paste the link in the Apple Music Artwork Finder search bar, hit [Enter], and then choose “Highest Resolution”. Works the same for playlist artwork and artist images.
For those of us that are lazy my quick/fast trick is to just use Amazon.com for the CD and click on the album art shown which will blow itself up in my browser, then just drag it over into my folder on mac for that album. I then just rename that file to ‘folder.jpg’ (I leave the extension alone whatever it is natively when dragged over). I find that the Amazon art is pretty good and usually high-enough resolution (for me anyways), but it can vary. Just don’t do this if you see an ‘amazon’ stamp on the art … very few albums have that, but you’ll see it from time to time on certain albums (I rarely see it).
Saves me A LOT of time because I just google the album and Amazon is usually at the top of my results (because of my poor shopping habits - yeah, Google knows me). Just click on that sucker and it opens in your browser ready to do the above trick. Sometimes it might take you to the amazon mp3 site for download - ignore that. Just go back and put ‘CD’ in your search at the end and it normally takes you to the CD purchase page at Amazon.
This is all well and good for the front covers, which are aplenty, but the back cover and liner notes are trickier. Now that cdcovers.cc and similar sites have shut down, there is very little out there. I’ve found that the best approach is to use Musicbrainz/Discogs and grab their plentiful but limited quality artwork, and then use an AI upscaler such as Gigapixel to increase the size and quality. Works well!
my quick/fast trick is to just use