If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a large collection of MP3 music files on your hard drive(s). Some of my MP3s were acquired from places like iTunes and Amazon, while others were ripped from my CD collection. The end result is a pile of MP3s – some with album art, many without.
At home I listen to music via SageTV‘s HTPC application and on the road I use an iPod – and it’s always helpful to have album art embedded into the file itself instead of having an additional photo file. MP3 files with embedded album art are just more portable.
For example, if you have a large MP3 collection that you want to transfer to the PS3, you’d want to have album art for each track since the PS3 can only sort one level deep for any media. If you embed album art into your media before transferring to the PS3, you can then group your collection by Artist and consequently view all albums by that artist with pictures for each track showing which album it belongs to. It’s the only decent way to currently use music in the XMB until Sony allows folder structures (and support for folder.jpg type album art on import)
When you have a large audio collection, manually adding album art to MP3s can be very tedious. So, my solution is to automate this process using MP3Tag.
A good and easy to use freeware is also Mp3 Cover Downloader.
MP4Tag didn’t work for me. All the other programs that came with it were a nightmare to try to get rid of.
I use taghycardia for adding cover art to my mp3 collection. While autotagging, the program searches for the album art to embed both locally and online, thus speeding up the process. The utility is free.