Cover Art Downloader

In spite of its all-business design and rather slim feature set, this utility for retrieving album cover art from the Web demostrates largely reliable performance. Cover Art Downloader's ho-hum interface is no more exciting than its name, with a large queue for loading up MP3s and another pane for selecting album art. Operating the program is simple: you just open a folder containing MP3s, select files, and press the Find Cover button. The application then will quickly generate a list of albums from the artist in question and let you scroll through them to find the right one. If you've never seen the album cover in person, you can resize the picture to get a better view. After you've found the right art, you can choose to resize it and automatically save it to the same location as your audio file. In our tests, Cover Art Downloader located art for the lion's share of the MP3s we threw its way, although it choked on a couple of obscure records in our collection. Still, we would like to see a few extra features, such as support for audio formats beyond MP3. An integrated player also would be a nice touch. Nevertheless, anyone who wants to add some visual flair to their digital music collections will find this application useful.