Being a person who is old enough to remember LPs, I rather enjoy album artwork, but iTunes seems to cock it up fairly regularly on the CDs that I’ve burned onto iTunes.
Either there is no artwork available for a given album, or sometimes the album artwork is wrong (usually it’s artwork for a different album of the same or similar name.) Also, if a song on the CD lists the artist slightly differently, it assumes it’s from a different CD and even if the artwork for the rest of the album was correct, it will show “no artwork” for that song. This all annoys me.
So how do I correct iTunes’ files? Ideally I’d like to be able to upload the correct picture to their central files so that nobody else has to suffer like I do but if necessary just fixing it on my computer/iDevices would be lovely. I assume I need to get the correct art, either by scanning it or finding it on the interweb, but what do I do from there?
Thanks,
MtO
(I put this in GQ because it’s a technology question, but feel free to move it to Cafe Society if you feel it’s more appropriate there.)
I have to do this with every album I copy from the local library.
Find the album on Amazon. Right click on the album cover and select “copy image”.
Right click on a song from the album in Itunes and select “get info”
Select “artwork” Right click the box and select “paste” and then “ok”.
If you click on a track in the Itunes window and do a “get info” (command-I) there is a tab where you can paste artwork. Whatever you paste in will be displayed when you play the track.
I use Wikipedia preferentially as I’ve found Amazon has artifacts in the images sometimes. Not sure if it’s no longer the case. But when you click through so the art is in a popup, they don’t let you copy it. Other times, there was an obnoxious white border. WP may not always have the largest images, so GIS can help, although size isn’t so important in iTunes. I use their lookup service first, but there have been times when I’ve gotten a horribly pixelated image (or missing as said), so I look elsewhere as needed.
Easier yet: Put iTunes and browser windows side by side. Find album on Amazon. Select song in iTunes. Drag album picture from Browser window and drop it into the pane where Album art is shown. You can even select multiple songs and drag the cover art into all of them at once that way. Much quicker.
Yes. I select all the tracks on an album and then right click to go to get info and then copy the cover into the artwork spot. I think it asks you if you want the changes to apply to all the selections. Just click ‘yes’.
You don’t even have to right click and get info. Just drag the picture into the lower left pane (where the artwork would show if it were already there.
Sometimes, though, for reasons I cannot fathom, you have to do this several times before the album art actually appears on your iPod. This seems to be a particular problem with iTunes Match. For a couple of particularly recalcitrant albums I’ve even gone so far as deleting songs from the library and from iCloud, reimporting them and adding artwork again, and the cover still doesn’t show!
I have a few tracks that refuse to accept any art whatsoever from any source. As soon as you hit enter, whatever art was in there disappears. I’ve even tried the deleting thing and it doesn’t help.
! Yeah! I’ve got that problem with some songs that I actually bought from iTunes, for some reason they don’t have pictures. I’ll try deleting them and re-downloading them, see if that fixes it.
And if it’s a song from a compilation/soundtrack, set the Artist as normal, and the album artist as “Various Artists” or similar. Otherwise it won’t find it.
Not sure if this is what you’re talking about, but: I get a bug where the cover shows up fine in iTunes, but is just a black square (rectangle) on the iPod. My fix is to remove the artwork in iTunes (don’t need to delete), sync, add to iTunes, sync. Doesn’t work all the time.
http://www.discogs.com/ is the best place for scanned images of album covers, and for discographic information in general.
Note that the image files at discogs are all named as .jpeg (four letters) and may need to be changed to .jpg (three letters) for some software.
Also note that naming an image “folder.jpg” and placing it in the folder with your mp3s will make that image work as the cover pic automatically in most programs.
but if necessary just fixing it on my computer/iDevices would be lovely. I assume I need to get the correct art, either by scanning it or finding it on the interweb, but what do I do from there?