Banish the Generic Music Icon For Good With Album Art Downloader XUI

The weekend is when you get your household jobs done. Whilst previous generations would spend their downtime fixing leaky taps, painting fences and completing all manner of small repairs around the house, nowadays we’ve added a plethora of digital jobs to the task list. My current favourite? Downloading album art for our digital music collection.

I’ve been spending my Sundays recently digging through our music library, filling in the blanks where we’re missing album art and where we do have album art, upgrading it to as high a resolution as possible. My mission is two-fold:

1. Ban the generic music icon from our house. It will not be seen in 2011!
2. Ensure album art looks great on every device we own.

The latter is actually a pretty big job. Sure, 300 x 300 pixel album art may look fine on a PC or smartphone, but scale it up to the large TV screen, and it doesn’t look that great. So, high resolution artwork is where it’s at!

So, I could sit down and try to Bing every album in my collection, but I may be some time. So, instead, I turned to a fantastic application called Album Art Downloader XUI – it’s a dedicated search engine for album art, with plugins for a growing list of artwork resources (currently clocking in at 30 resources). Enter an artist and album, and the app goes to work, bringing back thumbnails of the cover art from as many sources as it can find.

Search options allow you to filter results to bring back artwork of a minimum or maximum resolution, and once you’ve sorted results by size, you’ve got yourself the highest resolution artwork available on the net. Click once to preview, and click the disc icon to save locally to your hard drive. Lovely job for a rainy Sunday!