Cover art

With beets set up, fetchart and embedart handle cover art during the import and you never see this. It does not always find one — a twelve-inch pressing is exactly the release the Cover Art Archive is least likely to hold a scan for.

After an import

If the record went into the library with no cover, a panel appears offering three things:

• Fetch from the release — asks the Cover Art Archive for this release, and for the release group it belongs to. A pressing often has no cover of its own while the album plainly does, and the group is where the other editions keep theirs.
• Upload an image — a file from your machine.
• Skip — leave it for now.

Any time

The Cover art section of the Album panel shows the current state and has an Upload image button. It works before an import as well as after: the cover goes into the review directory, and beets takes a cover from the folder it imports, so it travels into the library with the tracks.

The size floor

Candidates below 500 px on the short edge are not installed. A small cover looks worse in a player than no cover at all, so it is refused with the size named rather than accepted quietly. Upload a better scan instead.

An installed cover is scaled to 1400 px, written as cover.jpg in the album directory, and embedded into every track when embed_art is on (the default). Embedding is what survives a file being moved out of its folder.

Verification happens before anything is written, so a download that turns out to be an error page cannot strip the art you already had.

Formats

Anything ffmpeg can read. It is converted to JPEG on the way in.