Album artwork in iTunes

am I going to have to manually add artwork to EVERY FUCKING TRACK?

i think yes, but if you're using a mac, just click the first song on the album, hold shift and click the last song and drop the cover in the white space where the artwork would be

also you don't need to save them to your desktop, you can just drag them off of safari and into the little white space

Ah, that makes things easier. I am on a Mac, aye.

also, you can just ignore this function because it's completely counter-intuitive and more trouble that it's worth

but then again, you post here.

I hated the fact that the jpg had to be saved to each individual mp3 at first, seemed like a waste of drive space, but that was before I started individually tagging album tracks with different parts of the packaging or alternate album covers or covers of the 12" singles etc, the mp3s aren't a bad place to store that data

im really particular about this too

if you're a pc user then mediamonkey does a reasonable job of finding and adding artwork from amazon. not completely automated but still much quicker than doing it all by hand.

For some reason my iTunes thinks that about 1/3 of the songs on my 80 gig iPod are from Italo Hits Vol 3. I am very not anal about this type of thing though, so I like it.

J0rdan's method doesn't appear to be working... The little green + sign is there, but the artwork's not appearing.

haha i was gonna do a 'rong cover thx gracenote thread'.

i can imagine a snarky end to this post but f the haters/keep it positive.

I can deal with snarkiness.

But fuck it; this is a forum completely and utterly occupied by geeks, music and otherwise; if people don't want their own files tagged with images, fine and dandy. I do, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

i guess album art lives on in the digital world as an avatar.

I like a visual representation of what I'm listening to; as someone who works with graphics you've got to appreciate that, aye? The functionality is there and it's pleasant, it enhances my listening experience, so I'm going to use it now I'm in a position to. Music files sans artwork are just a database, a list, a piece of information, and as such I find them at a remove, disenfranchised.

plus coverflow view looks gorgeous.

one thing i did not know is you can fool gracenote, if it gives you a rubbish image.

So has anyone got any suggestions for what I ought to do?

HOW THE FUCK CAN IT NOT FIND THER ARTWORK FOR LONDON CALLING?

I don't really understand. Maybe it's because you're using a Mac, but with itunes/ipod on Windows, it's just a simple matter of C&Ping artwork into the album cover field, and you can do that with an unlimited number of tracks at the same time.

Found a reasonably quick drag+drop process using the Get Info function and the next button, but it's still a little arduous.

how about multi-select and get info?

and does dragging the pic into the normal artwork display space (lower left) work for single items?

i find that it adds the picture i drag and drop in to all the items with the same album name and album artist in the get info section. i do find that the drag and drop only seems to work if the song is actually playing though. you can just add a different picture on top if you want. some pics don't transfer to your ipod though (but they are itunes) but many do

that was meant to say, the pictures are still in itunes even though they are not in your ipod.

i do find that the drag and drop only seems to work if the song is actually playing though

nah you must be just nuts there.

peanuts

I do it too, but I don't use I-Tunes, I just use Google images, then highlight all the relevant tracks in I-Tunes - Get Info, click on the blank window which takes me though to the folder where I have the pic saved, click on the pic, push okay and wait for a few seconds.

I am on the work PC so maybe not helpful, but I don't find it too much hassle.

That reads kinda badly, to clarify:

I don't use I-Tunes to locate the artwork for me.

You don't actually have to save the pic on your computer you know - you can just right-click and copy image off a webpage, and right-click paste image into itunes.

or even click-drag

Cool, thanks for that..

Nick, it "can't find artwork" for other huge rock bands too, usually the final holdouts. Sometimes, multiple reissues of an album can cause confusion. Also, sometimes it can't find the artwork because your internets had a hiccup.

I hated the fact that the jpg had to be saved to each individual mp3 at first, seemed like a waste of drive space, but that was before I started individually tagging album tracks with different parts of the packaging or alternate album covers or covers of the 12" singles etc, the mp3s aren't a bad place to store that data

I'm glad I'm not the only one who spends time to break things down like this.

If a CD comes with B-sides as bonus tracks, I usually just tag the proper album tracks with the album art, then create an "album" that is actually the 12" or whatever, and tag the maxi-single's tracks' artwork accordingly. If you create a band playlist that is the entire chronological discography, this really helps put the discography in perspective. Also, it's really fun in a super crazy OCD way.

Also, if you have an iPod with the Cover Flow feature, it's just super fucking cool to scroll through all the "albums", especially if they're peppered with accompanying singles in there as well. I know it's just a show-off nostalgia-sucking feature, and it hasn't been functionally useful for me, but sometimes I just go into a Cover Flow zen, wanting to look at all the pretty album art on the iPod.

how about multi-select and get info?

Exactly -- that should work for what you're trying to do. To add a cover for a particular album, just narrow down to that album using the iTunes browser so that only tracks for that album are displayed, then select all, right click and 'Get Info', then drag the album art to the little box for it. The new artwork will be saved, but it won't display until you actually play a track.

You can add more than one image to the album artwork field, but it's a little fiddly to get them in the right order (if only the front and back cover, you can just drag on the back cover before the front, but for more you'll have to Get Info for each track and reorder them manually).

there are some mac widgets that do this, I have one that works pretty well (automatically searches for art using google images, amazon, etc. and then add it to all album tracks with one click) but I'm not at home and I can't remember the name

but maybe look at some of this
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=itunes+album+art+widget

ARGH!!!!!

Even now I've got artwork for every single track on iTunes it's not all displaying on the iPod, fucking fuck fucker.

Yeah, don't cry if the iPod doesn't show it sometimes, lol.

Are you getting the default This Is Spinal Tap album cover instead?

this is fucked imo - so many albums in my library don't have covers

and the wrong ones are annoying too - wayne shorter's 'speak no evil' looks like some kind of early 70s classic rock album

the anthology of american folk music has some cover from a japanese koto music collection

I’m very anal about iTunes artwork as well — even going so far as to finding the covers of singles if the art is better than the album.
Does someone know why some artwork — whether I added it myself or it’s already there — inexplicably will disappear from certain albums? I thought when you added art it becomes imbedded in the song file, anyway.

one way around that is to change the composer or other metadata field. perhaps put Side B in the comments. i'm pretty sure that allows you to have diff. artwork per album. i believe it only allows one image per album. it will display the alternate image in the lower left hand corner if you're using coverflow.

But I lose the "correct" album artwork, too. There's really no rhyme or reason to it. It happens to different albums, at different times. Maddening.

Whenever a song from AIC's "Dirt" plays on my Ipod, the cover to the Hannah Montana soundtrack pops up.

this is so goddamned annoying

For the record, this works pretty well (assuming what you're looking for is findable on Amazon): http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/music/amazonalbumart.html

for The Saccharine Sea's album "Cherry CHerry" they have this as the cover

http://i43.tower.com/images/mm105841190/vol-2-don-cherrys-hockey-hits-cherry-cd-cover-art.jpg