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iTunes 7 "Get Album Artwork": Having Success?

How well did iTunes do in importing your music (% of needed artwork retrieved)?

  • 10%

    Votes: 5 6.1%

  • 20%

    Votes: 2 2.4%

  • 30%

    Votes: 5 6.1%

  • 40%

    Votes: 6 7.3%

  • 50%

    Votes: 9 11.0%

  • 60%

    Votes: 9 11.0%

  • 70%

    Votes: 13 15.9%

  • 80%

    Votes: 8 9.8%

  • 90%

    Votes: 11 13.4%

  • 100% - WOW! Awesome feature!

    Votes: 4 4.9%

  • 0% - Who coded this thing?

    Votes: 10 12.2%
  • Total voters
    82
longofest

longofest

Editor emeritus
Original poster
Jul 10, 2003
2,940
1,733
Falls Church, VA
So, after having used iTunes 7 for a few days now, in general I like it. However, I'm having mixed results with the "get album artwork feature."

Once, I got the following error: "You must have used iTunes to import your music to get album artwork. Re-import and then try agian." (I used iTunes to get my tracks, so this is bogus)

Other times, the feature just plain old doesn't work. It can't find well-labeled and popular music (like the Mulan Rouge Soundtrack (don't know if I spelled it right here, but its spelled right in iTunes)). I'd say it got about 1/10 of the artwork I asked it to get.

How about you guys?
 
worked for me. filled in all my missing album artwork within seconds. i am impressed with this new feature. i understand others are having problems with it, and that's expected with a new software release, but Apple is usually good about fixing these issues with an update. the animation of scrolling through the album art looks so cool! :D
 
It managed to find some covers for me, but I am still missing heaps! With it the way it is now, I won't be using the coverflow view to browse my music anytime soon. I think it might have something to do with the fact I live in Japan and a lot of the music I have isn't available on the Japanese iTunes. It's a shame coz it is such a cool looking feature.:(
 
it's worked for the most part for mine. A lot of the music i have dosnt have a album named for it so that makes it hard. I wish it would ask you if you wanted it to set the album name for you, and then download the album art. But over all i really like itunes 7.

Wish people that don't like itunes 7 would shut up and go make sure their lawn is precisely 1 and 3/8" tall with no weeds.
 
i voted 80% as that seems about right for what i expected it to do (i have alot of songs that came from compilation discs that i have made over the years and these songs just dont seem to be caught but the auto-naming-albumcover-etc functions).

I am very pleased.

If anyone has an easy solution for unnamed songs (ie. they show up as track x# when ripped) let me know.
 
I'm only getting about 30 percent. Plus, it doesn't always successfully group albums together, so when you're "flipping" through, it will have 10 in a row of the same CD, each with just one song on it.
 
Zip. Nada. Not a single album cover. It complained something the first time I tried it on (after the "We will spy you" -notice) and hasn't made a peep since. Maybe it will work with new rips but so far no luck.

All nice methods to get missing album art to iTunes will be appreciated even more with those new iTunes 7 views.
 
I believe it can only retrieve album art for albums it sells in your local iTunes Store. Things like Clutter pull from Amazon or elsewhere which tends to have an even larger library.

In the 3rd view (cover flip or whatever) it will sort the album covers how you have your tunes sorted. If you have a compilation disc (for instance a soundtrack with pop music songs like... Shrek 2) and have your iTunes library sorted by album and have the compilation disc checked as "Compilation" it will show the cover only once. If you have it marked as a compilation but have it sorted by artist it will show the album cover for every artist it encounters.

It makes sense I think.
 
I'm really miffed with my last artwork retrieval attempt - it's now managed to capture a few - but many are just the wrong albums....for example my burt bacharach album has been replaced with artwork from someone called 'Jack Jones Greatest Hits' - whoever he is - never heard of him - but I've got him and other artist artwork that I shouldn't have - now I'm going through the process of deleting these 'errors'.

the errors (for me) aren't just limited to different artwork being aligned to different artists - but wrong album covers are being assigned for even the same artist (now all my problems are with songs downloaded from the iTMs shop) I've no other music loaded.

For example, I purchased one complete Rudy Vallee album (through iTMs) - after doing the artwork search - I've got artwork for another album altogether (of one that I don't have).
 
slackersonly said:
If anyone has an easy solution for unnamed songs (ie. they show up as track x# when ripped) let me know.
Click to expand...

I'm not really gonna blame iTunes on that one... Kinda hard for iTunes to find your album art if it doesn't know what its called, eh? (hence me always making sure I am connected to the internet so i can get track names when ripping a cd)
 
SilentPanda said:
I believe it can only retrieve album art for albums it sells in your local iTunes Store. Things like Clutter pull from Amazon or elsewhere which tends to have an even larger library.
Click to expand...

That might be it. Apparently there's nothing I've ripped in the Finnish iTMS store. I'll need to get a 3rd party album art finder then.
 
slackersonly said:
If anyone has an easy solution for unnamed songs (ie. they show up as track x# when ripped) let me know.
Click to expand...
Try iEatBrainz. It does about a 50% job of analyzing the correct song from unnamed tracks, or even tracks that don't have album names, so you can use this in conjunction with CoverFlow in iTunes. Otherwise, enable CDDB in iTunes.

Having said about Get Album Artwork, it doesn't work very well. Sometimes I have to click Get Album Art up to 10 times to have it downloaded into iTunes. It's flakey at best, but may be a result of iTMS being overloaded.
 
I tried downloading cover art again last night and it worked much better this time. I probably got 80% of my "named" albums, and for the rest that I didn''t I just used Clutter.

I think overloading might have been the cause of problems so far for a lot of people.
 
I normally have to rework my tags on my .mp3/.m4a to match what's on iTunes Store. Otherwise I have the cover art for a lot of my songs already.
 
Works fairly okay. Get the album cover the majority of the time. The only annoying thing is that it sometimes if spelling is off by like one, like an additional S, it doesn't get the cover. But in my case, I need an app that gets the albumn name for all my songs because its annoying having to look for the album name for each song and manually changing it.
 
I had no album art before iTunes 7, so this is all new to me.

I keep getting more each day I try it, but I think I've only got 60% or so. I'm iPod-less at the moment, but when I do splash out on a new nano, I'll probably just delete the lot. It all seems like a lot of hassle — a lot of albums are wrong, and loads are missing, and I'd rather have the space on my iPod.

It's a shame, because I quite like browsing through the covers, and I've listened to some stuff I hadn't heard for a while because I'd forgotten the album cover. But I really can't be arsed to go through and sort out all the mistakes, and it takes up extra space, so unless it improves before I get an iPod, I'll go back to the old list view I think.
 
It took me about 13 tries before it finally started looking for the artwork, and then it filled in about half. I like the feature but I hope the bugs are worked out soon.
 
It's been working well for me.

I've found that it must get the Album artwork from the US stores as the Australian artwork differs in quality when compared.

Has anyone found some of the artwork to be low quality? and some at 300x300?

Overall a great feature to make the search for artwork easy.
 
When using Front Ront to view my shared music (another computer), it doesn't display the album art for the music. I hope in the near future Apple updates Front Row. But atleast when the songs are on the native computer running Front Row, the album art does show up.
 
Eidorian said:
I normally have to rework my tags on my .mp3/.m4a to match what's on iTunes Store. Otherwise I have the cover art for a lot of my songs already.
Click to expand...

I agree. Some songs I have had to change the genre/artist and make it look *identical* to the iTunes store file. Kinda annoying. It has the potential to be a great feature, but like most people, I don't like flipping through my files seeing a whole bunch of blank CD spaces... PS. I marked 30%
 
I have been loading my CD collection onto my iPod Touch. When I used the global "Get Album Artwork", it retrieved about 60% of the album covers.

Since then, I have been spoon-feeding the album covers in one at a time. But this is an arduous task. It requires finding the album in the iTune store and changing the artist/album title in the Music Library to exactly match what is in the iTune store. It has to be an exact match, otherwise the album cover will not load. I am probably up to 90% now.

Part of my problem is that my CD collection is around 15 years old and many of the albums are no longer sold.

It seems that some individuals were not loading album covers because they were trying to save memory. I loaded up 10.88 GB of music and when I loaded the album covers, the memory usage went up to 10.95 GB. That was not bad at all.
 
Similar, but different...

Anyone else have this problem: I triple checked the album names, artists and even the genre for several albums for which the album art wouldn't download and it still won't. This includes the entire Led Zeppelin catalogue and the David Grisman/Jerry Garcia albums, "The Pizza Tapes" and "Shady Grove," which all have album art in the iTunes store. The album art iTunes supplies is of high enough quality that I would like to use what they have instead of what I can find online on Amazon or wherever... any ideas? I just don't get it...
 
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