Add album art to mp3 or m4a with ffmpeg

Do you want your audio files to look as good as they sound? Adding a cover image to your MP3 or M4A files can significantly enhance your music library’s visual appeal. With this nifty Bash function, set-cover, you can automate the process of embedding cover images into your audio files using ffmpeg.

Copy the function definition and paste it into your terminal or add it to your .bashrc or .bash_profile file to make it available in every session.

# Set cover image to audio files
# example: set-cover -i cover.png *.mp3
function set-cover() {
  if [ -z "$1" ] || [ -z "$2" ]; then
    echo "Usage: set-cover cover.png|jpg *.mp3|*.m4a"
    return 1
  fi

  # Check if ffmpeg is installed
  if ! command -v ffmpeg &>/dev/null; then
    echo "Error: ffmpeg is not installed."
    return 1
  fi

  cover="$1"
  shift
  files=("$@")

  for file in "${files[@]}"; do
    ext="${file##*.}"
    output="out.${ext}"

    # common arguments
    args=(-y -loglevel error -hide_banner -nostats -i "$file" -i "$cover" -codec copy -map 0:a -map 1)

    # set cover image based on file extension
    if [ "$ext" = "mp3" ]; then
      ffmpeg "${args[@]}" -metadata:s:v title="Album Cover" -metadata:s:v comment="Cover (front)" "$output" && mv "$output" "$file"
    elif [ "$ext" = "m4a" ]; then
      ffmpeg "${args[@]}" -disposition:v:0 attached_pic "$output" && mv "$output" "$file"
    fi
  done
}

Then you can use the function like this:

set-cover cover.jpg *.mp3