I’ve been ripping CDs onto my computer for the last six years. That said, when I started coverart was unheard of (at least for me…) – I was just amazed that it could figure out the CD and track names after I first put the CD in. Well, years later and multiple backups and installs after the fact, I finally have gotten sick of not always having coverart for my music. I read about a Windows program which could embed the artwork right into the mp3 file, and I knew that there had to be a Linux version.

Yep, there is. Actually there are several, but this is the most powerful – albeit with a few limitations.It’s in the repos, so just open up a a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install easytag

yep, there ya go. Fire her up and find your music on your hard-drive. The only irritation is that you have the download the coverart for yourself and store it on your hard-drive and then retrieve it in the program. I heard of a program called albumart-qt (or something like that) which supposedly could download and embed the coverart all at once, but it apparently doesn’t always work consistently and the install seemed a little involved. That said, I like the ability to really dig into the tags assigned to my mp3s and decide specifically what coverart to embed in each file.

The only real irritation is that you can’t embed an image on multiple files at once – you have to select each mp3 individually and tell it to use a specific image. Irritating, but it does the job in the end – just don’t forget to tell it to save your changes!