Introduction:
In this short, 4-step tutorial, you will learn how to make custom album art for those mp3’s of yours that don’t come with album art already pre-embedded within the MP3 file itself. If you always use known reputable music e-tailer’s, such as Amazon.com, for your music purchases, this should never be a major problem. However, for those of you that don’t purchase from these e-tailer’s, and find your music without full tags, or simply want to create different album art for tracks that already have art, this tutorial is for you. The entire process should take less than 25 minutes.
Tools needed:
- GIMP Image Editor (download from: https://www.gimp.org)
- MP3Tag (download from: https://www.MP3Tag.de/en/)
- Windows Media Player or Apple iTunes
Optional:
- Freemake Audio Converter (download from: http://www.freemake.com/free...)
- Windows Virtual PC & Windows XP Mode
Step 1: Finding A Track
For this tutorial, we’re going to use the famous Windows XP welcome music file, found at: C:\Windows\System32\oobe\images\title.wma (assuming C:\ is your Windows OS partition) on the Windows XP operating system. If you already have a MP3 track you’d like to use, please, skip to STEP 2. If you don’t have Windows XP and are running Windows 7, consider installing Windows Virtual PC & Windows XP Mode and locate the title.wma file in Windows XP Mode at the location detailed above, then continue following along to the next paragraph.
For this example, we want to use the MP3 file format so we’ll use an audio converter to convert the WMA format, the music is currently encoded in, to a more tag-friendly MP3 file format (Should this be in a separate tutorial? Maybe, but we’ll discuss it here, for now, to complete our current example).To complete this task, we will use Freemake Audio Converter found at http://www.freemake.com/free_audio_converter/. With just a few clicks you can convert the WMA file into MP3 file format using the application as shown in the image below. Next, find the converted file and proceed to STEP 2.
Step 2: Preparing Your Image
We will next find the image on the hard drive we would like to use as the album art for the MP3 file, and open the file in the GIMP image editor application*. We will have to adjust the canvas size of the image sides to be equal to its smallest side (E.g. If you have an image with a width of 1920 (pixels) and a height of 1080 (pixels), then you will have to adjust the canvas to a width of 1080 (pixels), and leave the height as-is. This is achieved by disconnecting the link on the right side of the proportion fields, and adjusting ONLY the width value), hence, creating a perfect square. The canvas size window is opened by selecting ‘Canvas Size…’ from the ‘Image’ menu. The image chosen for this example was 1333×1000 pixels large. So we will need to resize the image to 1000×1000 . We will next need to scale the image to the proper size.
NOTE: The default size and format of MP3 album cover art is 400×400 JPG. If your image is already in this format please, skip to Step 3.
We achieve this by selecting ‘Scale Image’ from the ‘Image’ menu and leaving the link connected, we scale the image down to 400×400 (pixels).
Finally, we save the image as a high-quality JPG file under the name “Windows XP Album Cover Art”, and are now free to proceed to STEP 3.
Step 3: Using MP3Tag
We open the MP3Tag application, and using the file menu, add the directory where our MP3 audio file is stored. We then verify that the audio file was successfully imported by checking for its name in the right pane of the window. With the file highlighted in the right pane of the window, we will then need to click the extended tags button, as shown in the image below. Under the right-hand ‘Cover’ menu we will need to click the ‘Add Cover…’ button, and select the 400×400 JPG image we created earlier in STEP 2. MP3Tag notifies us that the image was saved (embedded) successfully. From here we can either add text tags or save our work, and close the application. We’ll add text tags later, so for now we’ll just save our work, and close the application. It is now time to proceed to step 4.
Step 4: Verification
Next, we will open Windows Media Player to check our work. To do this we place the MP3 File in the ‘My Music’ directory (‘Music’ directory in Windows 7), if not already there, and wait and watch as Windows Media Player finds the new track.
The track's shiny new cover art is then displayed in full bloom!
Going back to MP3Tag to edit the album name and other text metadata should be a piece of cake, and specifically what the app was designed for. So, to give you a fully finished example, I made these final modifications to the MP3 file and posted an image created of Windows 7 Media Player and iTunes below. Also Included (for free download) below is the finalized album art for the MP3 file (title.MP3) we used in this tutorial.
Conclusion:
I hope you had as much fun following along through this tutorial, as I did in writing it. From here, you should be able to successfully create album art for all those special tracks missing all their metadata. I also advise you to take the time to explore all of the applications used in this tutorial to see all the features and functionality they have to offer. If you liked this tutorial, please consider joining my blog or donating in the right-hand column of the page.
Downloads:
Windows XP Album Cover Art (PNG)
