Hi, I uploaded coverart for 2001 A Space Odyssey : http://musicbrainz.org/release/85bcd1a2-251d-4f57-a381-de9897b1331d/cover-art. But the thumbnails are in very bad quality. What can I do ?
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I agree that 250px looks munted. Especially when compared to the original.
The most efficient use of your time is probably to wait till somone with specific answer turns up.
If you want to traipse around the web now, then URLs like the following seem relevant:
General:
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/How_to_Scan_Cover_Art
Specific:
http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?143626-How-do-you-remove-picture-artifacts-like-these
Well, this 250x250 thumbnail looks just about what I’d expect seeing that the problem is the original picture. If I view the 7810x7810 original 19.3 MB (!) picture on my normal resolution monitor at 100%, I see upscaled JPEG artifacts everywhere.
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I’m seeing them on a laptop screen, and the bigest difference is on the colors. The 500x500 thumb is less colorful than the original. But on my smartphone screen, I can’t see the difference…
The thumbnail I see on your linked page does looks good to me.
The original is way too big for me to wait for the long loading, sorry. 
It seems overkill.
Not on my laptop screen, but maybe I want it too perfect 
What @yindesu says is true.
It seems you have applied some post processing that replaced colour dots by strange looking artefacts, see top golden banner, for example.
I don’t mind seeing colour dots as it is also what I see with a magnifying glass.
Where did you get the cover from? Did you scan this yourself?
A couple of problems I notice:
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You’ve got the resolution set to 72 pixels/in. It’s surely much higher than that—1200 ppi, maybe. This is a problem for anything trying to display the cover art actual size. (I believe the guidelines also suggest uploading at 300ppi, I personally feel 600ppi is sometimes warranted, but 1200 probably never is).
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It honestly looks like you took a JPEG and upscaled it. You’ve got magnified jpeg artifacts, and in general the whole picture looks like pixels have been duplicated. If you’ve done that, please don’t—at best it just wastes disk space.
If this is something you scanned, you need to scan at the resolution you want to upload at or higher. Do not upscale! And if your scanner has JPEG compression, you should probably turn that off.
Also, beware that scanners have optical resolution limits—typically far lower than the maximum resolution the scanner software lets you pick. The only practical way around the scanner’s optical resolution limits is to buy a better scanner.
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I just took the one from this : http://musicbrainz.org/release/4b46b997-76cb-48ef-8f98-b3bbaf89605c, put it in Photoshop and crop to have aspect ratio, and export it for the web with 100% quality.
Ah, the one you took it from has those issues, too…
Anyway, I looked at the edit history—you are aware of Picard’s Options→Metadata→"Translate artist names to this locale where possible" option, right?
Nope, I wasn’t 
If a cover is rectangular, please upload it as is with no crop.
Here is a thread from BGG that may provide ways to reduce visible artifacts in scans of printed material.
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