Creating CD Covers with Kover

Tanja Roth

$Revision: 302 $

$Date: 2007-07-02 10:18:27 +0200 (Mo, 02 Jul 2007) $

Kover is a small, basic KDE application for creating and editing covers for your audio CDs. It comes with Compact Disc Database (CDDB) support for automatic completion of artist and title information. You can also manually edit and enter the cover contents, choose background colors or add images and print the cover (including crop marks and lines for folding the paper).

Requirements

No special equipment or requirements needed—apart from some great audio CDs waiting to be “kovered”. If you want to print the original album artwork on your CD covers, having amaroK music player installed is helpful, but not mandatory.

Configuring Kover

Kover is shipped with openSUSE® but it is not installed by default. Install the kover package with YaST or from the command line. To start Kover, press -F2 and enter kover.

Figure 1.8. Kover Main Window

Kover Main Window

[Tip]Forcing a Certain Window Size

If on first start-up, the application window is too small and cannot be resized with the mouse, you can apply a bigger window size with KWin windows manager. To do so, right-click the application's title bar and select Advanced -> Special Application Settings. On the Geometry tab, activate the Size check box, select Force and change the window size values according to your wishes. Apply your modifications with OK.

To adjust some general Kover settings, select Settings -> Configure kover. There, you can adjust options for the CDDB connection, your CD drive, for the printing of the cover and the default fonts.

Creating Basic Covers

To create a cover, insert the audio CD in your CD drive. Click the CDDB lookup icon or select Kover -> CDDB lookup to fetch the audio CD information from the Internet. If your audio CD can be found in the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), the album title and the tracks are shown in the Title and Contents field. You can also edit them there, if needed. On the right, you can see a preview of the cover.

Figure 1.9. Automatically Created Cover with CDDB Information

Automatically Created Cover with CDDB Information

However, if your CD contains a compilation of tracks from different CDs, the CDDB query may fail. As CDDB identification of CDs is based on the length and order of the tracks, CDDB cannot identify playlists in which the order of tracks has been changed, or compilations of tracks from different CDs. In this case, enter the album title and the track information manually. By default, the album title is also printed on the spine. If you want to use a different text for the spine, click the Options button at the bottom of the window, and enter a separate desired spine text there.

Kover also supports the import of k3b files. To create a cover for a CD project you have saved with k3b, click Open, set the filter to k3b files and select the k3b file to open.

Customizing Your Covers

You can assign different types of fonts, font sizes, and font colors for the title page, the track list on the back and the spine by selecting the respective menu items from the Kover menu. With Background Color, select a background color which then appears on the title page and the back cover. Unfortunately, Kover does not allow to assign different background colors to title page and back cover.

Kover allows you to embed up to three different images on the front or back of the cover. To add images, click the Image Embedding icon, select an image file, choose one of the different positions under Target and define the appearance.

Figure 1.10. Customized Cover

Customized Cover

Using Cover Images From amaroK

If you use amaroK music player which can automatically fetch the CD cover images from an Amazon Web server, you can easily add the original cover image to your cover with a little bit of extra work. By default, amaroK stores cover images fetched from Amazon in the user's home directory: ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/albumcovers/large/ with numeric file names. In order to convert these filenames to more speaking names and to copy the images to the directory where the song files for the album are located, use the amaroK Copy Cover script provided by Aurelien Bompard.

Procedure 1.1. Copying Cover Images to Your Music Directory

  1. To get the script, start amaroK and select Tools -> Script Manager.

  2. In the Script Manager that opens, click Get More Scripts.

  3. From the list of new scripts, select Copy Cover (amaroK Script) and click Install.

    The installed scrip then appears in the amaroK Script Manager in the General category.

  4. Select the Copy Cover script and click Run.

  5. If you want to configure script options such as the filename for the image files, click Configure and set the options according to your wishes.

Alternatively, you can also run an offline version of the Copy Cover script from the command line. Switch to ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/scripts/copycover/. If you want to do a test run first, enter python copycover-offline.py -vd, otherwise run the script directly with python copycover-offline.py.

After your cover images have been copied over to your music directory, embed them with Kover as described in the section called “Customizing Your Covers”.

For More Information

Find the official Kover Web page at http://lisas.de/kover/.

While Kover is a nice application for quick and easy creation of CD covers, it does not fulfill more advanced demands (and surely was not intended to). To search for further applications (includingTeX/LaTeX solutions) for creating CD covers, checkout http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=cd+cover.

You can also use an OpenOffice.org template to create CD covers. OpenOffice.org 2.0.4. (included in openSUSE 10.2) provides several templates related to CD cover and label creation.