Album Art

Librarian can keep a cover picture for every album in your library, and AutoCast shows the playing song's cover on screen. You can add covers by hand, get them from pictures already inside your music files, or let Find Album Art look them up for you.

Covers are saved as 800×800 pictures in your Station's Logs/Database/Covers folder, one per album. Each song's Cover Art attribute holds the name of its picture. Your audio files are never changed.

Adding a Cover by Hand

Select a song and scroll to the bottom of the Attribute Editor. The Cover Art row shows the song's cover, or an empty box.

• Drop a picture onto the box: from the Finder, from Photos, or straight from a web page.
• Paste: copy a picture anywhere (for example, right-click a picture on a web page and choose Copy Image), then click Paste.
• Remove takes the cover off the selected songs. Librarian remembers, and Find Album Art won't put that cover back.
• Click the picture to see it full size.

When other songs share the album, Librarian asks whether to use the picture for all of them or just the songs you selected.

Any picture works, whatever its size or shape: Librarian resizes it to 800×800 and fits a non-square picture on black, without cropping or stretching it.

Pictures Already in Your Files

Many music files carry their album cover inside them. When new songs arrive in your library, Librarian takes that picture and makes it the song's cover automatically, as long as the song doesn't have one yet and the picture is at least 300 pixels across.

Find Album Art

Librarian looks up each song's album cover art, so AutoCast can show it while it plays. Songs that already have a cover are left alone. Matches Librarian isn't sure about wait in “Needs Review” until you approve them.

Open the Attributes tab and choose the Album Art sub-tab.

1. Choose what to look up:
   • All songs in the selected folder (the folder selected in the sidebar). With All folders selected, this means your Music folder; commercials, liners and jingles don't have album covers.
   • Only the selected songs in the song list.
2. Click Find Album Art.

Only songs without a cover are looked up. Songs that already have one, including any you set yourself, are never changed.

For each song, Librarian checks, in order:

1. a picture already inside the file;
2. the Cover Art Archive, the free, open picture library of MusicBrainz;
3. Apple iTunes, for songs MusicBrainz doesn't have. You can turn this off by unchecking Apple iTunes, when MusicBrainz has no cover on the tab.

Before it accepts a match, Librarian makes sure the song is really on that album. It compares the artist, the title and the song's length, and it prefers the song's original album over later reissues and budget collections. A wrong cover on the air is worse than no cover, so when Librarian isn't sure, it doesn't guess.

The Three Lists

• Needs Review: covers Librarian found but isn't sure about, with the reason (for example, "length differs by 4:56" or "only a re-recorded version found"). These never go on the air until you approve them. Select one or more and click Approve or Reject.
• Not Found: songs no source had a cover for. Librarian checks these again on its own every couple of months. Select songs and click Try Again to look now, or add a cover by hand.
• Tag Problems: songs whose tags and file name disagree, for example "Tags say Lindsey Buckingham – Trouble; file name says America – Ventura Highway", and songs with no artist at all. Librarian won't guess a cover for these. Fix the tags (the Detect tab can help), then run Find Album Art again.

Undo This Run

Undo This Run removes the covers the last run added. Covers you set yourself are left alone, and the removed covers aren't added back by later runs. Before a run writes its first cover, Librarian also saves a copy of your library as library_before_album_art.tsv in Logs/Database.

New Songs

With Automatically find covers for new songs checked (the default), new songs in your Music folder get a lookup a few minutes after they arrive.