http://norman.walsh.name/2008/04/15/coverArt 11 38 2008-04-15T15:32:40-04:00 Norman Walsh 2008 Norman Walsh Using the Amazon search API as a quick-and-dirty way to find album covers. I recently discovered that album cover art can be embedded in MP3 files (using the ID3v2 APIC tag). I wouldn't much care except that I've also got an iTunes extension (CoverSutra) that will display that art when a song is playing. That's kind of cool, but I've got several hundred ripped albums with no cover art. I'm not scanning it all myself! A few web searches for cover art were enough to convince me that Amazon is a good place to get it. And they have a search API, don't they? After a quick trip to CPAN, I had a shell script that would grab covers. One of my Twitter followers asked to see it, so here it is: So, for example: perl getcover.pl -a "flogging molly" -k "within mile home" returns the cover for the Flogging Molly album Within a Mile of Home. It blindly assumes that the first match is the right one, it unceremoniously writes the cover to /tmp/cover.jpg, and it assumes that open will display it. Oh, and it won't work until you replace “YOUR-AMAZON-KEY” with, well, your Amazon key, naturally. Still it seems to have done a reasonable job on 350 or so albums. Now my “rip for iTunes” script embeds cover art when it's available. And I get pretty pictures on my desktop. Sweet.