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).
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.
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.
![]() | Forcing a Certain Window Size |
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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 -> . On the tab, activate the check box, select and change the window size values according to your wishes. Apply your modifications with . |
To adjust some general Kover settings, select
-> . There, you can adjust options for the CDDB connection, your CD drive, for the printing of the cover and the default fonts.To create a cover, insert the audio CD in your CD drive. Click the
icon or select -> 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 and field. You can also edit them there, if needed. On the right, you can see a preview of the cover.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
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
, set the filter to and select the k3b file to open.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
menu. With , 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
icon, select an image file, choose one of the different positions under and define the appearance.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
To get the script, start amaroK and select
-> .In the
that opens, click .From the list of new scripts, select
and click .The installed scrip then appears in the
in the category.Select the Copy Cover script and click
.If you want to configure script options such as the filename for the image files, click
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”.
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.