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I use Google Music Player for a lot of my music (the stuff that required bulk-upload; for new music I greatly prefer Amazon). It's decent.

What drives me absolutely crazy though is that all my albums are imported with the wrong art. It would be one thing if most the albums showed up as "art not found", but instead, 10% of my albums show up with the album art for "Pulp", another 10% with album art for "Nick Jaina". It's just darn distracting.

I know how to change the art for a given album to a picture on my hard disk. I do not want to have to manually search out album art and upload it times a thousand.

Is there a way to force the album art to refresh? Or maybe just delete it, I don't know. At the very least is there somewhere where I can submit this bug?

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Here, take a bounty! You better be grateful, I can't comment anymore. :) – Ian Carroll Apr 18 at 0:34

2 Answers

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+100

Removing the cover art is easier than correcting it, but I'll cover a few options.

Removing all album art from Google Play: From the songs page, select every track. Right-click within the selection and select 'Edit Info' from the pop-up menu. On the cover art icon, click the X to delete the cover art from all your songs.

Removing just the bad album art: Create a playlist for albums with bad cover art. Go to the Albums page and add the ones with bad art to the new playlist. Select all the songs in that playlist and delete the cover art as above.

Actually solve the problem: First, you need to edit the ID3 tags on your MP3s. (I'd be surprised if these were not the source of your album art troubles. Edit: Looks like I was completely wrong about that. Seems Google Play has some album art problems and they know it. Mea culpa.)

If you have Windows, download Album Art Downloader from SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/album-art/. HowToGeek has a nice step by step process for correcting your MP3 library's album art.

If you are on OS X or Linux, it is a bit trickier because there is not one standout bit of software that I've used to fetch and embed album art. iTunes, for example, does not automatically embed album art in your ID3 tags and the process for doing so depends on what version of iTunes you are using. Blegh. However, the song metadata at MusicBrainz is pretty good and they have a cross-platform-ish ID3 editor called MusicBrainz Picard that, with a plug-in called Cover Art Downloader, will grab covers for all your albums and embed them as needed.

You still need to delete cover art in Google Play to get the new art to update. In fact, you may need to delete entire tracks or albums and re-upload them with the new ID3 tags. In researching this I found the latter method to be effective and sufficiently quick, but your mileage may vary.

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Thanks, great trick for removing album art in bulk. I am quite sure this is not a problem with id3 tags though. For one thing, nearly all my music is purchased from emusic and always shows up with proper tags when played locally. For another, among hundreds of albums, there's only maybe about 20 different covers, they just seem to repeat arbitrarily. But great tip nontheless. – George Mauer Apr 21 at 22:06
Oops, you're right about the ID3 tags. Looks like Google is aware of an album art issue, and I edited the answer accordingly. – Christopher Harwood Apr 22 at 2:31
Wow, that's all they have to say about that issue? "Not Very Helpful" indeed. Odd that while most Google teams are relatively open this one is so closed off. I wonder if it's just been completely cannibalized of its developers at this point – George Mauer Apr 22 at 19:08
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I don't know about that. I'll take acknowledgement of an issue over radio silence. – Christopher Harwood Apr 23 at 19:44
up vote -2 down vote

Though this isn't the "update cover art of my thousands of albums without having to touch each one" the question is really asking, it is a detailed process for doing each album individually.

This can be done with the following steps:

  1. Open Google Music Player and select the album you want to modify the cover art on.
  2. Click the menu indicator located in the lower right corner of the cover art place holder.
  3. This should give you a menu that has "Edit album info" as an option Edit album info menu option
  4. Clicking this should open the editable form where you can change all album info
  5. Again you see a cover art placeholder, this one is the one you can click to add a different image. Edit Album Info form Select an image
  6. Select an image and that's pretty much it. Added image
  7. Click the "Save" and your tracks now have the album cover art displayed.enter image description here
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I'm sorry but this is a through answer to the wrong question. This is exactly what the last paragraph of my question says. I know how to select a new image but doing it for the thousands of albums I have uploaded is unreasonable. I need a way to force google to recalculate or at least remove their album art (or their issue tracker so I can report the bug). – George Mauer Mar 28 at 13:29
So your question is really "How can I update the cover art to my thousands of albums without having to touch each one?" If so, I'd like the answer to that as well. – Xavier Casto Mar 29 at 15:53
Yup, I didn't think the question implied otherwise. – George Mauer Mar 29 at 15:57
Had I not overlooked the most important part of the question (the "note") I might have skipped answering the question. – Xavier Casto Mar 29 at 16:03
@George, If you really want to re-Tag ALL of your albums you will probably have to wipe out those stored in Google Music and do that function locally before reloading into Google Music. Outside of that, setting aside an hour or two for doing the method you don't want to do looks to be a faster method than waiting for some more specific method. – Xavier Casto Apr 19 at 18:30
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