Artwork on itunes

Emperor Tomato Ketchup

I am rather new to the itunes thing having previously used an MP3 player with a simple windows interface. One of the things thats confusing and irritating is the artwork for albums. Which seems very hit and miss. Even when I've added artwork it does not always display, in some cases it will display in album view but not for an individual song or sometimes the other way round. I've at least oen album where it displays on one or two albums

I have a lot of music that was ripped previous to itunes. My wife still has a non-apple mp3 player so I would rather not use the proprietary apple format.

Using the "get artwork" command in itunes seems very unreliable. I can understand that some really obscure music or sourced from my vinyl is not there. However, I've ripped dozens of albums listed in the itunes store and it will not give me artwork for when requested.

Also some was collection so again the source wav files were unique. So again I can understand itunes won't recognise those ones.

So in some cases I have been manually adding the pictures when I go through the "get info" dialogue box. Again it sems hit and miss as to whether it will display on my iphone.

I know this might be a bit vague but is there any way to ensure art will display consistently. I am resiggned to having to do it manually for at least some of my music as it is obscure or recorded by myself and so I don't mind adding my own art. However, do I need to worry about size, format or do I need to attach them to the album or to each song?

it won't solve everything but is there a solution to the itunes not getting artwork problem?

Makaveli

I believe for the artwork to show up for every song you need to embed it into each one, if you only select one song and get the artwork for it you won't have it for the entire album.

As far as iTunes not finding the artwork despite having it in the store, you need to make sure the files are tagged correctly so it can find a match.

If you're adding these songs with artwork to an iPod I find it causes major lag on my 6th gen Classic. I've removed pretty much all the embedded album art from my mp3s.

wilford

I just upated all my itunes artwork,
It did take the whole evening to get everything,using the get artwork feature won't get you your artwork unless you've purchased the album off itunes.
The first thing to do is use google to search for the artwork your after and save it to a folder then you need to click on the first song on the album,hold shift until all the album is highlighted then hit ctrl and i at the same time this brings up multiple items screen,now all you need to do is open the folder where the image is and drag it to the artwork box click ok and that was it for me.
It is a pain but then itunes is never easy.

smtdos

Media monkey is a handy program for getting your itunes library in order. (get rid of duplicates, find artwork etc).

Similar to previous post, what I have done is:

• For each album, highlight all the songs in the album and right click --> get info
• Then tick the 'artwork' checkbox (it is blank so this will remove any current artwork leaving you with a blank album to work with meaning your not adding a second artwork image to songs, saving space)
• Click OK
• Then just find the album cover on google images, copy it, paste it into the album artwork window in the bottom right corner of itunes with the whole album highlighted. This will apply the artwork to all songs in the album.

Makaveli

wilford wrote: »

using the get artwork feature won't get you your artwork unless you've purchased the album off itunes.

That's incorrect, it won't work unless you have an account on the iTunes store but you don't have to buy music through iTunes to get the artwork.

BostonB

I have all my music in MP3's my own rips, and theres no problem with iTunes updating the artwork. With the obvious exception, that anything thats not mainstream probably isn't in iTunes. Also that iTunes isn't great at tagging anyway. But mainstream stuff it should be ok.

Also theres been a few bugs, and also the tagging standards are not handled the same across difference devices. So using something like Media Monkey to cross check everything is the only way to make sure.

Sometimes MediaMonkey will find tags or artwork that iTunes won't and sometimes (far less often) it the other way around.

parsi

I find the auto retrieval of artworks to be haphazard but find amazon to be the ideal spot to get the missing pics.