High quality album arts

[paradoxal 2948]

Finding good quality album art for your favorite visual kei bands or Japanese bands in general isn't always an easy task.

 

Where do you find high quality album art?
Do you usually scan the album arts yourself or have you found a source full of high quality covers?
Do you simply use Google?

Or do you even care about the quality of album arts?

 

I've found the best source to be Okmusic. Of course they don't have everything, but they do have some and that's the first place I check when I'm adding album arts to my albums. Most of the covers there are 1200x1200 but you need to do a few tricks to be able to download them. Okmusic has blocked downloading their covers, but you can easily find the picture from the source code (ctrl+U) of the page after opening the album art in a new tab.

[nick 10212]

I usually take good quality album arts from Amazon Japan either Visual Kei or J-Pop (500px or higher resolution is good enough to be displayed in foobar2000 and a portable music player IMO).

And as of late, there have been 1500px album arts available for newer releases, though.

[hiroki 5521]

Normally I just "search image" a couple of times using Google. If I don't get any good results then it prob means that even if a HQ album art exists, it's not worth the time to scour the internet for it. Thankfully as more and more stuff make their way onto Amazon and iTunes it has never been easier to find HQ covers.

 

For the rarer stuff I'm usually forced to scan the album art myself but unfortunately my scanner is pretty crap (it sure beats a 300x300 image though).

 

Also, be careful because sometimes the dimensions can be misleading. For instance a 1200x1200 art can be upscaled from 600x600 and you're better off getting the 600x600.

[Eraser 66]

In most cases, I use the iTunes Store (they have high quality artworks in 600×600 resolution, which is more than enough for me). If you register an account there, you can download any cover by clicking on a song you have and selecting "Get Album Artwork". However, it won't actually save it - when you remove the file from the player, the artwork will be gone. To prevent this, after selecting "Get Album Artwork", do the following: Get Info -> Artwork -> Copy -> open any image editor (IrfanView, for example) -> paste -> save it as .PNG -> Get Info -> Artwork -> Add. This way the image will remain within the file until you manually remove it.

Another source I can recommend is the last.fm gallery. Since everyone is free to upload cover arts, it's a good way too find the best quality available. Just go to an album, click on the cover, then select the one with the most positive votes. To view the full size image, go to http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/X.png (X = the serial number of the image).

Here is an example:

http://www.last.fm/music/DIR+EN+GREY/UROBOROS

http://www.last.fm/music/DIR+EN+GREY/UROBOROS/+images

http://www.last.fm/music/DIR+EN+GREY/UROBOROS/+images/67738798

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/67738798.png

[CAT5 9075]

ototoy generally has some fairly nice-sized album art, although their selection doesn't consist of much Vk.

[Nyasagi 259]

I usually use google for bigger images. If I can't find any, there are none. I also wouldn't trust people's scans, because most people can't scan in HQ.

[daamxlaws 61]

or you can use Album Art Downloader. 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/album-art/

[paradoxal 2948]

or you can use Album Art Downloader. 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/album-art/

 

Wow, that sounds so great! Does it really work, eg. for small indie bands?

[daamxlaws 61]

Wow, that sounds so great! Does it really work, eg. for small indie bands?

well, I can't tell. you should try for yourself