Is there a way to tell Picard to prefer digital cover art where available?

MusicBrainz Picard
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If Picard matches my files to an LP release, the cover art it chooses is often someone’s off-centered, desaturated photograph of the record sleeve from discogs or whatever. While I give it credit for being so thorough this looks kind of ugly in a media player compared to a nice brightly-colored rendering of the album art from Amazon. (Same thing with matching Japanese CD releases. I just wanted the bonus tracks, not a photograph of a jewel case with a promotional slip written in Japanese!)

I see cover art options for only pulling front, back, etc. (I’m only interested in front covers and already have that set) but nothing that would direct it to pull from a specific release in a group. Am I missing something? Any way to automate this?

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Pick the “CAA Release Group” art as that is normally a more generic \ better image. That’s the overall image for the Release Group in MB and not the exact match to the Release.

Or pick the alt source of somewhere like “fanart.tv cover art” by using a plugin.

Amazon art can often be patchy on older releases if it is coming from their second hand sales side.

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Fanart.tv needs setting up with an API key, but they are about prettified images for media players and is likely a best choice for your use. If you add the plugin, close and reopen the options to then be able to set it up.

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Or The Audio DB plugin, very similar in regards of the images :slight_smile:

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I feel like in these cases, the artwork should be tagged as “Raw/Unedited”, no? In that case it should be easy to exclude those in Picard, as well as anything but Front and Back artwork. I’m not by my computer at the moment to double-check, but I believe those settings are somewhere under “Cover Art” on Picard.

Granted, that doesn’t help if they aren’t tagged as such…

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I don’t completely understand this flag but this discussion could be useful for what @shamboni wants, too:

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The settings can be found in the “Download only cover art images matching the selected types” section of the Cover Art Archive option settings. The dialog allows you to identify types that you would only consider as well as those that you never want to consider, and looks like:

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However, as @UltimateRiff pointed out, this won’t help if the images aren’t tagged appropriately in the MusicBrainz database.

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Re-processing a few albums to test this and it looks like a mix. Some of them aren’t tagged, some of them are tagged but the editing is not quite up to snuff. Like they cropped the background surface out or whatever but the image will still clearly be tilted and faded with maybe an awkward sliver of black or white along one side.

Sounds like the plugins for the other databases are probably what I want anyway if they are meant specifically for this purpose.

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Imo your first port of call is to enable the ‘CAA Release Group’ option in Picard, as @IvanDobsky recommended, and order it first in the queue.

That exists pretty much to solve your problem!

If you then have a situation where the image isn’t a nice one, go to the release group in musicbrainz and hit ‘set cover art’. Then pick the nicest one for tagging, and set it. Team work makes the dream work :grin:

This will obvs only work if a nice (probably digital) release and cover is in the group. If not, use one of the other options - or add a digital release/cover to mb and then set that as the group image :heart_eyes:

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