EmbedArt Plugin

Typically, beets stores album art in a “file on the side”: along with each album, there is a file (named “cover.jpg” by default) that stores the album art. You might want to embed the album art directly into each file’s metadata. While this will take more space than the external-file approach, it is necessary for displaying album art in some media players (iPods, for example).

This plugin was added in beets 1.0b8.

Embedding Art Automatically

To automatically embed discovered album art into imported files, just enable the plugin (see Plugins). You’ll also want to enable the FetchArt Plugin to obtain the images to be embedded. Art will be embedded after each album is added to the library.

This behavior can be disabled with the autoembed config option (see below).

Manually Embedding and Extracting Art

The embedart plugin provides a couple of commands for manually managing embedded album art:

• beet embedart IMAGE QUERY: given an image file and a query matching an album, embed the image into the metadata of every track on the album.
• beet extractart [-o FILE] QUERY: extracts the image from an item matching the query and stores it in a file. You can specify the destination file using the -o option, but leave off the extension: it will be chosen automatically. The destination filename defaults to cover if it’s not specified.
• beet clearart QUERY: removes all embedded images from all items matching the query. (Use with caution!)

Configuring

The plugin has one configuration option, autoembed, which lets you disable automatic album art embedding. To do so, add this to your ~/.beetsconfig:

[embedart]
autoembed: no