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iPod touch Album art???
- Thread starter Gix1k
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iTunes is your medium. open the help menu and type "album artwork" (assuming you have Leopard). otherwise just have a bo-peep around iTunes' help
thats what it there for.
I've found that some things are not quite as well-implemented in the Windows version of iTunes, but the basic rules should still apply. For this post, I'm going to assume that you're using the Mac version of iTunes.
It seems you have a few questions; I'll try and address them individually:
1) Re: Adding album artwork you've found online
If you've searched around and found the art for your albums, you'll need to save all of the image files to your hard drive before they can be assigned to the albums in iTunes. I find it helpful to make a folder on my hard drive called "Album Artwork", and just save all of the image files (.jpg, .png, .bmp, etc.) to that folder -- that way, when I go to assign them in iTunes, they're all in one place.
Open that folder, so that its window is open. Then go into iTunes, and go to the albums you want to attach the artwork to. Select all of the songs in the album (click, Shift-click), then right/Ctrl-click on the selection, and click "Get Info". Then do one of two things:
a) If there is only one song in the album, the standard "Get Info" box will come up. Click on the album art tab, and then go back to your album artwork folder, and drag the image you want to the empty artwork box in the "Get Info" window. Click "OK", and your artwork is applied!
b) If there is more than one song, you'll get a different dialog box. First, unless you've disabled it, you'll get a warning asking you if you want to edit the information for multiple files -- go ahead and click "Yes". Then the dialog box that allows you to edit the information for all the songs you've selected comes up. There are no tabs in this window, like in the "Get Info" box for a single track; instead, all of the editable fields are available in one window, including a little empty white box for album artwork. Like with the single song procedure, go back to your album artwork folder, and drag the image you want to the empty artwork box (a little checkmark will appear next to the box, which will now show a little thumbnail of your artwork). Click "OK", and your artwork is applied!
Do this for all of your albums, and then re-sync your iPod; all the artwork should now show up.
2) Re: Advanced>Get Album Art.
Generally, unless there's something else playing/transferring/converting/etc., iTunes will show the progress of the album art retrieval in the little window where it shows the track info and audio scrubber for a track that's playing. If it's worked, you should be able to see the art on the albums when you're in Cover Flow or Album View; otherwise, you can bring up the little slide-up window in the bottom left corner to show the art. Putting it in Cover Flow is the easiest method, in my opinion, because as the art is being applied, you'll see the images appear in front of you in the Cover Flow display.
Sometimes, if you have a song or album selected, it will only search for art for the ones that are selected. If you're finding that it's not getting the art for you, try either selecting everything in your library, or having nothing selected at all.
Also, in the Mac version of iTunes, when you're in Cover Flow, you can right/Ctrl-click on an album cover and click "Get Album Art", and it will search for that album's art and apply it, without your having to select the songs yourself. Also, remember that not all albums have art in the database iTunes accesses, and that if you don't have a proper iTunes account, it won't search for you.
3) Re: Adding art for every song in an album.
When manually attaching art to albums, the album art is only applied for the songs that you've selected and attached it to (i.e. just because you add it for one song in an album, it will not automatically add it to the rest of the songs in the album). To get it for every song, and therefore the album as a whole, you can apply the art using the batch-adding method I detailed above (1b).
If you're adding art automatically (i.e. via Advanced>Get Album Art), then it will add the art to every song in the album automatically.
I hope this helps! Let us know if this works for you.
Good luck, and take care,
Sojourn
It seems you have a few questions; I'll try and address them individually:
1) Re: Adding album artwork you've found online
If you've searched around and found the art for your albums, you'll need to save all of the image files to your hard drive before they can be assigned to the albums in iTunes. I find it helpful to make a folder on my hard drive called "Album Artwork", and just save all of the image files (.jpg, .png, .bmp, etc.) to that folder -- that way, when I go to assign them in iTunes, they're all in one place.
Open that folder, so that its window is open. Then go into iTunes, and go to the albums you want to attach the artwork to. Select all of the songs in the album (click, Shift-click), then right/Ctrl-click on the selection, and click "Get Info". Then do one of two things:
a) If there is only one song in the album, the standard "Get Info" box will come up. Click on the album art tab, and then go back to your album artwork folder, and drag the image you want to the empty artwork box in the "Get Info" window. Click "OK", and your artwork is applied!
b) If there is more than one song, you'll get a different dialog box. First, unless you've disabled it, you'll get a warning asking you if you want to edit the information for multiple files -- go ahead and click "Yes". Then the dialog box that allows you to edit the information for all the songs you've selected comes up. There are no tabs in this window, like in the "Get Info" box for a single track; instead, all of the editable fields are available in one window, including a little empty white box for album artwork. Like with the single song procedure, go back to your album artwork folder, and drag the image you want to the empty artwork box (a little checkmark will appear next to the box, which will now show a little thumbnail of your artwork). Click "OK", and your artwork is applied!
Do this for all of your albums, and then re-sync your iPod; all the artwork should now show up.
2) Re: Advanced>Get Album Art.
Generally, unless there's something else playing/transferring/converting/etc., iTunes will show the progress of the album art retrieval in the little window where it shows the track info and audio scrubber for a track that's playing. If it's worked, you should be able to see the art on the albums when you're in Cover Flow or Album View; otherwise, you can bring up the little slide-up window in the bottom left corner to show the art. Putting it in Cover Flow is the easiest method, in my opinion, because as the art is being applied, you'll see the images appear in front of you in the Cover Flow display.
Sometimes, if you have a song or album selected, it will only search for art for the ones that are selected. If you're finding that it's not getting the art for you, try either selecting everything in your library, or having nothing selected at all.
Also, in the Mac version of iTunes, when you're in Cover Flow, you can right/Ctrl-click on an album cover and click "Get Album Art", and it will search for that album's art and apply it, without your having to select the songs yourself. Also, remember that not all albums have art in the database iTunes accesses, and that if you don't have a proper iTunes account, it won't search for you.
3) Re: Adding art for every song in an album.
When manually attaching art to albums, the album art is only applied for the songs that you've selected and attached it to (i.e. just because you add it for one song in an album, it will not automatically add it to the rest of the songs in the album). To get it for every song, and therefore the album as a whole, you can apply the art using the batch-adding method I detailed above (1b).
If you're adding art automatically (i.e. via Advanced>Get Album Art), then it will add the art to every song in the album automatically.
I hope this helps! Let us know if this works for you.
Good luck, and take care,
Sojourn
Hmm, that's weird. If you're on a Mac (I don't think you can do this from the Windows version, but I might be wrong), you could also try selecting them and then right/Ctrl-clicking on the selection, then choosing "Get Album Artwork" from the context menu that comes up. Other than there being a problem with your iTunes account log-in, I'm not sure what would be wrong -- if there just wasn't any art coming up, I'd guess that it just wasn't finding the albums you have, but if it's not showing that it's processing them at all ,then that's something else.
Just to be safe, I'd recommend quitting and then relaunching iTunes, not playing music or doing anything else (just in case there's something that's interfering with your ability to see the progress bar; you should just see the Apple logo up there now), making sure you're logged in to your iTunes account, and trying again.
Also, this may seem like a silly question, but are you properly connected to the internet when you're doing this? And do you have anything running on your computer that would be blocking/interfering with iTunes's ability to access the internet?
Also, how did the non-automatic art retrieval go? Were you able to manually put on the art you found on-line?
Take care,
Sojourn
When I used to have a windows computer (about 9 months ago) and tried to get the album artwork via itunes it wouldn't do it either, I had to do it manually, yet I've always been able to do it since on my macbook without fail.
You can do it without saving the image. At least, this works in iTunes for Windows, and I can't imagine why it wouldn't on a Mac. The key/mouse click combinations are probably different, but here's what I do.
Find image on a webpage. Right click on the image, select "copy."
Switch to iTunes, do "get info" on the song(s) you want to apply the album art to, select "Artwork" tab / find "Artwork" box in multiple song info view.
Right click in the white space for the artwork, select "paste."
Click "ok" to close Get Info and save the artwork.
Nice -- I've never been sure if iTunes is saving its own copy, or whether it's necessary to save my own on my HDD. Good to know!
Take care,
Sojourn
I manually added all of them..Now when I add music I make sure I add the cover at that time to stay on top of it.
If you do it the way they explained, it will forever be saved in the mp3 file... so you will never have to do it again if you need to move your library.
If you do it the way they explained, it will forever be saved in the mp3 file... so you will never have to do it again if you need to move your library.
Now that I think about it, you're absolutely right -- I've experienced that, myself. Is it saved as part of the ID3 tag, or is it some other sort of metadata or tagging?
Take care,
Sjourn
It is saved as an ID3 tag. In fact, even though I explained how to do it in iTunes, as I figured readers of this forum would be familiar with iTunes, I personally use a separate ID3 tag editor to add my album art (as well as do other edits to the ID3 tags), and they show up in iTunes, and from there to my iPods.
I use one called "MP3Tag" -- There's at least two editors with that name, lol. I don't know if they have a Mac version. I like it because it lets you rename the file from the tags, or pull info from the filename into the tags, and perform complex search and replace on the tags -- like change all "&" to "and," fix capitalization problems, etc.