coverdl

A command-line tool for downloading high quality album cover art.

Installation

pip install coverdl

Usage

Download cover art from album directory:

coverdl /artist/album/

Download cover art using track file:

coverdl "/artist/album/01 - Track Title.flac"

By default, the Apple Music and Deezer providers will be used to find cover art. You can specify a different provider like so:

coverdl -p itunes /artist/album

You can specify more than one provider by passing the -p option more than once:

coverdl -p applemusic -p itunes /artist/album

The order in which the providers are specified matters, as they will be used for priority ranking.

Click here for a list of providers.

Upgrading

coverdl will not download cover art for albums that already have them. Instead, you can upgrade them to a better quality version.

The --upgrade option allows you to upgrade your existing cover art to a better quality version (if found) by comparing the similarity of both images. This allows you to safely upgrade your existing cover art while being sure that a different version won't be downloaded by mistake:

coverdl --upgrade /artist/album/

Your old cover art will not be deleted, it will be renamed: e.g cover.jpg to cover.jpg.bk To tell coverdl to delete it, pass the --delete-old-covers option.

Use the --max-size option (in MBs) to prevent coverdl from replacing cover art that exceed a certain size.

Use --max-upgrade-size (in MBs) to prevent downloading cover art that exceed a certain size.

Use the --strict option to ensure only perfect comparisons will be upgraded. For example, if your cover art has an explicit advisory label in the cover art while the upgrade candidate doesn't, --strict will block the upgrade.

Use the --replace-non-square option to also upgrade cover arts that aren't perfectly square. This can be useful to replace cover art that have bad white lines on the edges or to replace images that aren't really cover art.

Advanced

Piping

coverdl supports passing multiple paths to it via the pipe operator. This can be useful for advanced use cases, for example:

If your library structure follows ARTIST/ALBUM, you could download or upgrade cover art for albums only added within the last day:

find music/ -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -mtime -1 -type d | coverdl

Which can be useful as a cron job to speed up performance without using -r.

Downloading for an entire music library

If you have a large music library and you wish to download or upgrade cover art for all albums, use the -r/--recursive option while passing the path to your media library:

coverdl -r /music

When using --upgrade

Using --upgrade alongside -r/--recursive can be slow, and each run of the command will take the same length of time.

You can tell coverdl to skip already upgraded cover art on the next run by passing a cache file:

coverdl -r --upgrade /music --cache /PATH/TO/CACHE/cache.txt