iTunes Cover art

[Jaykay]

I was just noticing how bad apples implementation of the cover artwork thing is. Im a big fan of the idea of the cover art being viewable while the song is playing. I like the the idea of having it under the playlists, but has anyone noticed that 1. It doesnt look up the album covers which is quite easy to do (with amazon or something) and 2. a biggie, i imported an album cover for a silverchair album but it only came up for that one song and not the rest of the album even though the album name and everything is identical. Thats means that i will have to import 3671 album covers if i want them all. I cant see myself doing that.

Any thoughts?

[mkubal]

Can you highlight multiple files and then select the cover art? If not I would imagine that Apple would fix a problem like this at the next update. You might just have to wait for an update.

Matt

[Jaykay]

agghhhh, and i thought that was one of the coolest features. I know, I know im weird.

[dynamicd]

A little off topic but is there a way to change the color of the itunes icon? That green just doesn't look good with everything else being blue.

[Kwyjibo]

i agree, i wish i coudl do it for the wohle album maybe a 3rd party program soon.

[ultrafiel]

You can just select multiple tracks (ie the whole album) then drag the cover art into its box. It will then apply the album art to all the songs selected. I actually went to amazon and found the cover art, dragged the picture from safari right into iTunes and it worked fine. Where is the cover art stored though? Maybe I should look.

[Kwyjibo]

either your a genius or were all dumb or somewhere in the middle. Thank you so much.

[howard]

about the cover art...i dragged in more than one cover for a song and now theres arrows down there....how do i delete the cover that i accidently put in there?

[szark]

Originally posted by ultrafiel
Where is the cover art stored though? Maybe I should look.

The cover art is stored in the ID tag of the song itself. When you add cover art, you can see the song size change.

Originally posted by howard
about the cover art...i dragged in more than one cover for a song and now theres arrows down there....how do i delete the cover that i accidently put in there?

There is a tab in the "Get Info" window called "Artwork" which can be used to add/delete cover art.

[howard]

thanks a lot!

i feel stupid for not figuring most of the above on my one...but hey i really like this cover art feature now that i know how to use it

[MacAztec]

hillmanminx makes a program. find it on version tracker. search for CD cover

Its called CDCoverTool 1.1.1 or something.

You search for an alblum/artist, and it downloads you a cover. works great for me.

[mnkeybsness]

wow!...that's the slowest method for me to find cd cover art...

search versiontracker for "clutter"
clutter automatically finds the cover art of what you are playing and you can copy right from the main window.

also, a great website for cover art is www.allmusic.com

but i would still rather have a script that will just download and add the picture to the album...

actually i wish itunes would do it for me...

and isn't it supposed to do it when you rip a cd? i ripped a cd today and it didn't find it for me...or was that just for when you download from applemusic?

[jaybeekay]

i'm getting an "album artwork not modifiable" message on the cover preview screen. What is that about?

[Jaykay]

Originally posted by mnkeybsness
wow!...that's the slowest method for me to find cd cover art...

search versiontracker for "clutter"
clutter automatically finds the cover art of what you are playing and you can copy right from the main window.

also, a great website for cover art is www.allmusic.com

but i would still rather have a script that will just download and add the picture to the album...

actually i wish itunes would do it for me...

and isn't it supposed to do it when you rip a cd? i ripped a cd today and it didn't find it for me...or was that just for when you download from applemusic?


I dont think it will get it from CDDB as i dont think they do album covers (i wish they would though) only from the music store.



Originally posted by jaybeekay
i'm getting an "album artwork not modifiable" message on the cover preview screen. What is that about?

Great choice on a name (not sure about the bee though).

[evoluzione]

i'd love the ability to print them, at a decent quality i mean. so if i do buy a full album, i can then burn it to cd, and print the cover, put it in one of them slimline cases. i still like to have the physical object from time to time.

[baby duck monge]

Originally posted by dynamicd
A little off topic but is there a way to change the color of the itunes icon? That green just doesn't look good with everything else being blue.

you can kinda do this. without photoshop (or something similar) you can't change the color of the note in that particular icon, but you could find another itunes icon (at any site that has icons) and replace yours with a blue one.

to do this all you do it find the icon you want (it will usually be given to you as a blank folder). "get info" on that folder, and copy the icon.
get info on itunes and paste the new icon over the old one.
drag the old itunes icon out of the dock and drag the new one into its place.
all done.

[dynamicd]

Originally posted by evoluzione
i'd love the ability to print them, at a decent quality i mean. so if i do buy a full album, i can then burn it to cd, and print the cover, put it in one of them slimline cases. i still like to have the physical object from time to time.

That'd be a great idea, but I think the problem might arise that people who have pirated the material would be able to get the art also.

[baby duck monge]

as far as getting cover art from amazon goes... all the ones i have looked for have a "x% off" tab in the corner. if there any way to get rid of this? do some albums not have this? thanks!

[NavyIntel007]

I noticed that adding cover art made the size of my library bigger i think by 100 KB per picture. That adds up after a while. Also, I'm wondering if the cover art is transfered onto the ipod even though it's not being used. I would like to put the cover art on all my songs but I only have a 5 GB iPod so space is at a premium.

[Jaykay]

Originally posted by NavyIntel007
I noticed that adding cover art made the size of my library bigger i think by 100 KB per picture. That adds up after a while. Also, I'm wondering if the cover art is transfered onto the ipod even though it's not being used. I would like to put the cover art on all my songs but I only have a 5 GB iPod so space is at a premium.

It probably will as i assume it will add it to the ID3 tag, which is good because if you move it to someones elses computer it will still be there, but i can see how the size would be a problem.

[crookedcharlie]

Originally posted by baby duck monge
as far as getting cover art from amazon goes... all the ones i have looked for have a "x% off" tab in the corner. if there any way to get rid of this? do some albums not have this? thanks!

I found that if I "click to see larger picture," this goes away, and I end up getting a bigger size cover as a nice side-effect.

[Jaykay]

use cdcover tool (as mentioned by someone previously - if you read this feel free to take the credit) which you can get on versiontracker.

I find it better than amazon.

[NavyIntel007]

I just did a test. 8 song play list, three songs bought from apple and added cover art from amazon and it took up 300 KB more on the ipod for art added to the other 5. doing this for 500 songs would be 30 MB.

Since I haven't bought that many songs from Apple I'm not going to worry about the art that comes with the song but it sucks that Apple didn't impliment it so that the images were not fed to the iPod on sync. Oh well...:rolleyes:

[makkystyle]

What I would really love is the ability to print this artwork... maybe I'm just slow but the only way I could figure out to do this was using Snapz and just taking a jpeg picture of it when it was enlarged. And on a similar note, why doesn't iTunes have a simple program that could print the playlists and possibly album art of the CD you are burning. I'm guessing they don't want the album art so they don't make it impossibly simple to make homegrown copies, but is a list of tracks too much to ask for?

[howard]

where is the art stored?

[stuckwithme247]

Originally posted by howard
where is the art stored?
please read the damn thread before you say things like this.

[anneleonard]

Originally posted by baby duck monge
you can kinda do this. without photoshop (or something similar) you can't change the color of the note in that particular icon, but you could find another itunes icon (at any site that has icons) and replace yours with a blue one.


Here's the link for a set of icons called FlavorTunes, so you can choose exactly what colour you like, its got blue and purple as well as white n stuff:

FlavorTunes SIT file:
http://homepage.mac.com/kohlmannj/files/flavorTunes.sit

I've stuck with the purple one as i'm really fussy about icons and i can't stand that new green colour.

Anne.

[mrjamin]

Originally posted by mnkeybsness
wow!...that's the slowest method for me to find cd cover art...

search versiontracker for "clutter"
clutter automatically finds the cover art of what you are playing and you can copy right from the main window.

also, a great website for cover art is www.allmusic.com

but i would still rather have a script that will just download and add the picture to the album...

actually i wish itunes would do it for me...

and isn't it supposed to do it when you rip a cd? i ripped a cd today and it didn't find it for me...or was that just for when you download from applemusic?

was just about to suggest that, clutter is amazing!

[Fat Tony]

I'm streaming from my home machine to the office and there is no cover art even though I've got the cover art working at home. Anyone else running into this or is this a standard thing for iTunes streams?

[xaven]

Originally posted by mrjamin
was just about to suggest that, clutter is amazing!

The other cool thing about it is the way it works with iTunes and Panther.When I listen to an album on iTunes; Clutter automatically goes and finds the cover art for me, then I drag a copy of the art to my Desktop (to create my desktop "clutter", and then select the "add cover to iTunes" menu item and it automatically copies the cover to all of the songs in that album. Very slick. Now I've got hundreds of covers on my desktop. Double click on one and it plays the album. Use the Exposé feature on Panther to align and view all of the clutter as thumbnails at once ... best tool so far! I'm using Clutter to go through and add the art to all of my albums this way.

[SBG88]

Clutter works very well. I've never had a problem of only showing art for one song.

[Flowbee]

Originally posted by makkystyle
And on a similar note, why doesn't iTunes have a simple program that could print the playlists and possibly album art of the CD you are burning.

On Versiontracker: Create iTunes CD Cover (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21231).

It's a script for iTunes that uses OmniGraffle to create a cd cover with track listing and album art. Very simple to use and works perfectly. It even prints multiple thumbnails on your cd cover if you've made a compilation.

Requires OmniGraffle (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/9324), which is free.

[hubert8]

On the subject of album art... has anyone noticed songs "skipping/shaking" for a brief second after adding album art? The majority of my songs (90%) have album art and I'm beginning to notice songs skipping in the beginning and definitely noticing it as I paste new art onto other songs... any help would be appreciated

[anneleonard]

its just like any change you make to the actual mp3/aac files themselves, you are in essence opening, editing and saving an mp3/aac with new information, so the playing of that file is almost guaranteed to have some disruption. its the same as changing the album name, or any other detail, really. there's no problem as far as i can tell.

[hubert8]

Thanks for the prompt reply. I agree with everything you have said, but the skipping is getting progressively worse. I can deal with the skipping when adding album art, but not if I'm just listening to the song on my iPod. I guess the reason that I'm bringing this up is that it never behaved like this before (even when i first began adding album art) so I am a little concerned. Maybe I'm adding "too much" album art (doubtful)? This skipping/shaking only occurs when I listen to my iPod when it is connected to my powerbook and NOT when I listen to the iPod alone.... computer issue??

Is it possible that my HD is too fragmented? And if so, is there a way of degragmenting iPod HDs?

Thanks.

[live4ever]

Here's some other iTunes icons.

http://www.xicons.com/details/762.html

[benixau]

go look on versiontracker for a program called: FetchArt
I find it works better than clutter for getting the album art but it has less features as a comprimise.

[jayscheuerle]

The jpegs you find online are hardly suitable for printing CD covers for. They're the visual equivalent of an mpeg encoded at 20kbps.

The best implementations for cover-art would be a separate file that rests within the album folder. Embedding the same cover art into every song on the album is a grand waste of drive space and a great example of poor thinking.

[xhost_plus]

In iTunes 4.5 you could multi-select songs and drop in the cover art for them. This was a great way to update a bunch of songs at the same time. With the release of iTunes 4.6, you can only do one song at a time. If you multi-select songs the "Album Artwork is Not Modifiable." :mad:

Has anyone else experienced this?

[MacUser1]

What I would really love is the ability to print this artwork... maybe I'm just slow but the only way I could figure out to do this was using Snapz and just taking a jpeg picture of it when it was enlarged. And on a similar note, why doesn't iTunes have a simple program that could print the playlists and possibly album art of the CD you are burning. I'm guessing they don't want the album art so they don't make it impossibly simple to make homegrown copies, but is a list of tracks too much to ask for?

why don't you just go up to file-->print in the iTunes application. you could print artwork and playlists since iTunes 4.5, i think.

[zim]

The jpegs you find online are hardly suitable for printing CD covers for. They're the visual equivalent of an mpeg encoded at 20kbps.

The best implementations for cover-art would be a separate file that rests within the album folder. Embedding the same cover art into every song on the album is a grand waste of drive space and a great example of poor thinking.

I agree. I love putting art onto my songs but seeing how I only listen to my music either through iTunes or my iPod, it would be brilliant of iTunes to manage this in a more intelligent way i.e. creating an album art file in each folder, just as you said.

The same thing could be done with the addition of song lyrics. iTunes could create an xml file, or something, contained in each folder, that would store and manage all the contents for each album. iTunes would also update that file based on the addition or subtraction of songs.

[DVDSP]

In iTunes 4.5 you could multi-select songs and drop in the cover art for them. This was a great way to update a bunch of songs at the same time. With the release of iTunes 4.6, you can only do one song at a time. If you multi-select songs the "Album Artwork is Not Modifiable."

In 4.6 I am multi-selecting, then pushing Apple+I. That brings up the "Multiple Song Information" dialog box. I add the artwork there. I usually get the artwork from Amazon, control click and choose "Copy to Clipboard" and then paste into iTunes. Works fine for me.

Here's my question: A co-worker who uses iTunes on XP claims that when he imports a CD iTunes is grabbing the artwork for him, he doesn't have to place it himself. I don't believe this but can not disprove it since I don't have a Wintel box available to test it myself. Can anyone confirm or deny this for me? Thanks.

Also, hey, old thread, huh?

[abhishekit]

I used clutter earlier but I found the window ugly.
I have been using synergy. It sits on the desktop, background can be made transparent, looks great , but its not free, not very costly either. But still its one of the few non-useful :) apps I have paid for.
Notice synergy in the bottom right.

cheers

[Mac|caM]

In iTunes 4.5 you could multi-select songs and drop in the cover art for them. This was a great way to update a bunch of songs at the same time. With the release of iTunes 4.6, you can only do one song at a time. If you multi-select songs the "Album Artwork is Not Modifiable." :mad:

Has anyone else experienced this?

I'm still multi-selecting and dragging-and-dropping in iTunes 4.6. I don't have any problems.

[Nermal]

The only time I've had the "not modifiable" message is when trying to add artwork to a .mov or similar file that can't accept artwork.

[Vanilla]

I use Synergy (http://synergy.wincent.com/)

Its a really nice app that places three buttons on your menu bar which will control iTunes even when its closed and when a song is played will display a floating bar with an album cover and details etc.

The style of the buttons can be changed as well as the type of information the floating bar display, the length of time it stays on the screen, level of transparency, position etc. It does other cool stuff as well but that is the essence

Album covers are searched for and downloaded from Amazon and placed in a folder within library/application support/synergy/album covers. When you play a song it first looks in iTunes for the cover image, then goes to this folder and if both fail then searches on Amazon. You can of course disable this function as well if you wish.

I guess/assume that this setup will also remove the problem with iPod transfers (iTunes tracks being bloated in size due to embedded images) as the album art can remain in the synergy sub-folder, OUTSIDE of iTunes.

Alternatively of course you can copy the artwork across from the synergy sub-folder into iTunes (BTW: I have 4.6 and you CAN update multiple tracks at the same time by highlighting the required tracks and dragging the artwork in).

It is shareware and only costs 5€ to register.

Vanilla

[Sol]

On the subject of album art... has anyone noticed songs "skipping/shaking" for a brief second after adding album art? The majority of my songs (90%) have album art and I'm beginning to notice songs skipping in the beginning and definitely noticing it as I paste new art onto other songs... any help would be appreciated

I noticed a similar glitch when playing the art-included tracks on my MP3 player. The solution for me was to select the tracks in iTunes and from the Advanced menu choose Convert ID3 Tags... In the pop-up window select ID3 Tag Version: v2.3

After doing that my player produced no glitches when playing the art-included tracks. This MP3 player is a Kodak MC3; basic, but it gets the job done.

Each audio file with artwork included will increase in size. For this reason you should only use medium-to-high JPGs that are no bigger than 320 X 320. Anything more would be overkill.

Clutter is indeed the best utility for downloading album art. It gives you a choice between Amazon USA and Amazon UK so even obscure Brit-pop can be located ;) It is free too!

[xhost_plus]

I'm still multi-selecting and dragging-and-dropping in iTunes 4.6. I don't have any problems.

Well, it must be *gasp* Windows. I am here at work and we don't get the luxury of using OS X. Although, it works if I multi-select the songs, right-click and "Get Info" and add the art that way.

[Beck446]

Well, it must be *gasp* Windows. I am here at work and we don't get the luxury of using OS X. Although, it works if I multi-select the songs, right-click and "Get Info" and add the art that way.

That's weird. I'm on OSX w/ 4.6 and I can drag and drop to multiple songs.

[Windowlicker]

2. a biggie, i imported an album cover for a silverchair album but it only came up for that one song and not the rest of the album even though the album name and everything is identical. Thats means that i will have to import 3671 album covers if i want them all. I cant see myself doing that.

Any thoughts?

yes. have you ever heard of drag & drop? works with iTunes too. just select the tracks you wish to have the cover art and drag the file to the cover art window (below the playlist menu). I haven't even thought I should do it from the track info window.

[kb@MacRumors]

An alternative to selecting and dragging is this script that searches your iTunes catalog for artwork then copys that art to the rest of the songs on the album. Select the tracks that don't have art and execute the script.

Put it in your hard disk's library> iTunes> Scripts folder. Not in your user library. I'd like to give credit to the author. Forgot who it is. He calls the script "Arthur". Enjoy!


tell application "iTunes"
repeat with newTrack in the selection
if album of newTrack is "" then
display dialog "The selection must have album name specified." buttons {"Cancel"} default button "Cancel"
else if kind of artwork 1 of newTrack ? 0 then
display dialog "That track already has artwork." buttons {"Cancel"} default button "Cancel"
else
set newAlbum to album of newTrack as string
try
set oldTrack to null
repeat with precedent in (tracks of first library playlist where album is newAlbum)
if kind of artwork 1 of precedent ? 0 then
set oldTrack to precedent
end if
end repeat
if oldTrack is null then
display dialog "No precedent found." buttons {"Cancel"} default button "Cancel"
else
set oldArt to artwork 1 of oldTrack
set olddata to data of oldArt
set data of artwork 1 of newTrack to olddata
end if
on error
display dialog "Couldn't copy the artwork." buttons {"Cancel"} default button "Cancel"
end try
end if
end repeat
end tell

[Mr. G4]

In iTunes 4.5 you could multi-select songs and drop in the cover art for them. This was a great way to update a bunch of songs at the same time. With the release of iTunes 4.6, you can only do one song at a time. If you multi-select songs the "Album Artwork is Not Modifiable." :mad:

Has anyone else experienced this?

Actually you have to multiple select, then Command + I, then drag the cover art in the box.