Embed cover art in bulk
July 26, 2010 in album art by Dan Gravell
Embedding art in your music files is the most portable way to store your album artwork. Most music players recognise it, and there are no additional files to copy when transferring your music. If you have lots of albums, though, how to bulk embed all that album art? This is where bliss helps out. Here's how to use bliss to automatically embed album art in bulk.
Choose your music library
Locate the music files on your hard disk. These are the files bliss will scan and embed album art within. bliss supports MP3, OGG, FLAC, WMA, M4A and M4P formats. It can work against iTunes libraries (but it won't read artwork within iTunes... yet).
Re-use existing art
If you already have art stored in files that you want to embed in your music files, enter the file name of the image file. bliss picks this up from each album directory. If it's not there, this part is skipped. Common examples are 'folder' (on Windows) or 'cover'. bliss adds the correct suffix for the type of file, e.g. 'cover' may become 'cover.jpg' or 'cover.bmp'.
Embed art
Make sure 'Embed cover art in music files' is set to 'Embed art where possible'. If art is already embedded, bliss will re-use that art. You can change the art later.
Click 'Apply rule'
bliss is now scanning your music library. If art doesn't exist for an album it tries to locate and download new art from respected sources. If artwork already exists for an album, bliss will not change it.
Once complete, you can change the art for each album and the album artwork will be automatically embedded for you.
Here's a video of me performing the steps above:
