To get the most out of your digital music collection, the files need to be maintained and administered, not unlike you would have maintained and administered a physical collection. This means, in particular, to keep the data in a well thought-out folder and labeling structure and to actively manage and maintain meta data.
Unfortunately, neither the labeling nor the CoverArt provided by download providers is in any sense of consistent quality. If you are looking to find alternative and high-quality CoverArt, here are some good sources:
- Amazon: one of the world’s largest music dealer with extensive CoverArt of unfortunately widely varying quality. But it’s worth a try
- CD and LP: Website of a large CD and vinyl trader with largely high quality CoverArt of all genres
- Internet Archive: For the highly unusual searches of LP and CD CoverArt. With its collections from the Audio Preservation Fund, the Internet Archive even has CoverArt of 78rpm albums
- Jackets of Classical Music Box Sets: Collection of LP CoverArt of box sets from the classical music segment
- London Jazz Collector: Website with many vinyl and CD album covers from the Jazz world in high resolution.
- Miles to Mozart: Web database with largely high quality vinyl and CD CoverArt from classic and Jazz genres.
- MusicBrainz: an opensource platform for album metadata with high quality CD CoverArt
- Piano Piano!: Website with many vinyl album covers in high resolution.
- Shaded Dog: Web database with high quality CoverArt of RCA Living Stereo LPs.
- Vinyl Album Covers: Web database with high quality vinyl CoverArt of all genres.
Beyond those website, there are some software solutions that allow you to search a host of websites in parallel, like ‘Album Art Downloader’ (Album Art Downloader download | SourceForge.net). Although the Album Art Downloader rarely delivers high quality results, it allows you to separately search für back CoverArt and booklets, which is handy.
