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iTunes album art frustration

E

EricT43

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 5, 2011
193
1
Holy cow. I imported all of my music into iTunes when I got my new iMac a few weeks ago, and iTunes dutifully found artwork for about 20% of my 814 albums. Many of these albums are recent and major releases. The obscure stuff, I could understand, but Audioslave, David Bowie, Rush?

So I set out on a mission to find an app to help me with this.

Cover Scout - $30, no way
Artwork Gofer - free, the find all feature crashes, one-at-a-time searches are hit and miss
TuneUp - works fine, but also a $30 app
Amazon Art Finer - nice widget which goes on the Dashboard, which is useless since I need it on the desktop

I would be happy to pay $10 or $15 for an app like Cover Scout, but IMO $30 is way too much for an app like this. Anyone have a good solution that I may have overlooked?
 
All these apps that automatically fetch tags and artwork always get a few things wrong, so I feel the time needed to check that everything is correct would be better spent doing it manually in the first place.
 
GGJstudios said:
I prefer manually adding artwork that is of higher quality than iTunes downloads, using sites like Album Art Exchange, or Google.
Click to expand...

Jolly Jimmy said:
All these apps that automatically fetch tags and artwork always get a few things wrong, so I feel the time needed to check that everything is correct would be better spent doing it manually in the first place.
Click to expand...

I see the wisdom in what you're saying. If I add art to all the tracks on each of my albums, will they stay there if, say I import my library again on a fresh OS install, or move them to a different computer?

Thanks!
 
EricT43 said:
I see the wisdom in what you're saying. If I add art to all the tracks on each of my albums, will they stay there if, say I import my library again on a fresh OS install, or move them to a different computer?
Click to expand...
Yes. When iTunes downloads artwork, it stores it in a separate folder. If you fail to move that folder when you move your music, you lose all the artwork. However, when you manually add artwork, it's added to the .mp3 itself, so wherever the music file goes, the artwork goes.
 
I just do a Google image search. I didn't have a ton of albums missing artwork, but I just did it a few at a time, whenever I had a few minutes to spare. (Each album doesn take too long, but if you have a lot to do the time will add up.) I also used this to group b-sides together as one "album" and just stuck in a picture of my choosing for the artwork.

The image seems to stick to the file as metadata wherever I move the file around.
 
I've found a solution!

1. Find the album you're looking for on the iTunes Store in iTunes.
2. Right click the artwork and select copy link.
3. Paste the link in Safari, I'm using Plaid – Scintilli as an example here:

http://itunes.apple.com/se/album/scintilli/id463989378

4. Right click the artwork on the website and select "Copy Image Address", you will get a link similar to this:

http://a3.mzstatic.com/us/r1000/086/Music/01/01/86/mzi.xxxswskr.170x170-75.jpg

This is the small album art, to get the large version replace 170x170 with 600x600 like this:

http://a3.mzstatic.com/us/r1000/086/Music/01/01/86/mzi.xxxswskr.600x600-75.jpg

Voila!

I've tried it for every album that iTunes couldn't find with "Get Album Artwork" and it worked flawlessly.
 
Missing artwork

Have experienced the same problem but discovered the artwork is there, just not displaying. Just right click and get info. If the artwork is there it will show up in a couple of seconds.
 
Trick Still Working?

rewozz, your trick was working fine for me the last several days up until about an hour or so ago. Now it fails with every album I try. Do you think they've closed this method of accessing high quality artwork, or is something else going on?
 
I was going make a post about this.

I had some issues with Album Art after moving data from my old Macbook to my MBP. I also noticed my Art folder was 800MB!

I moved the folder out and ran iTunes. I let it discover everything again. 85% of my collection are ripped CD's, the rest is from iTunes.

iTunes missed about 179 albums out of almost 1000. Some were legal bootleg MP3 live albums or outtakes iTunes would never get, some were import CD singles.

What really bothererd me was that iTunes could not find (on two machines!) some of the same albums that they sell. Unbelievable.

Nirvana - Nevermind, Bon Jovi - Slippery When Wet, Bruce Springsteen - Magic....all are not found by iTunes! No error code, nothing. I checked on two machines and no dice.

How is this possible? Other Nirvana, Bon Jovi and Bruce albums had their art. It couldn't even find art for War by U2. These are from CD rips that had the art beforehand in iTunes.

Finally, my current Art folder(s) is now 500 MB and I'm missing about 2 dozen albums that are common, sold on iTunes and had Album art previously.

It boggles my mind and frustrates the hell out of me.
 
Yaboze said:
Finally, my current Art folder(s) is now 500 MB and I'm missing about 2 dozen albums that are common, sold on iTunes and had Album art previously.

It boggles my mind and frustrates the hell out of me.
Click to expand...
I recommend adding your album art manually. See the 2nd post in this thread.
 
Anyone have any ideas on this one? This worked great until very recently. There must be some kind of work-around.
 
I noticed you can create a smart playlist of albums that don't have album art and selecting each album then going to "get album art". Meaning you do it for each album and it finds the art..

But when you run the task on all albums at once, it craps out and doesn't find anything.
 
if only SJ was still here...

We need Steve Jobs to come back from the dead and ask: "How is 'Get Album Artwork' supposed to work? Then why the #$@! doesn't it do that?!".

;)
GGJstudios said:
Yes. When iTunes downloads artwork, it stores it in a separate folder. If you fail to move that folder when you move your music, you lose all the artwork. However, when you manually add artwork, it's added to the .mp3 itself, so wherever the music file goes, the artwork goes.
Click to expand...

So, just to clarify, this means the image file (i.e. cover art) is embedded into the audio file itself, and not stored in the default iTunes "Album Art" directory, correct?
 
Should you want to embed all external iTunes album art in to the files themselves, just run this script.
 
Update

I didn't do anything about the missing album art. I simply don't have time to visit (although excellent) the album art exchange site and do each album I'm missing.

Since this post, I have been randomly clicking some of the blank albums whenever I am in iTunes and today....one of the albums "popped" with cover art.

I went back and manually tried a few others and they worked.

So I ran the process and it found art for over 60 albums that were missing. I mean really, not having art for Nevermind by Nirvana? :rolleyes:

Anyway, I am back to where I was before and then some. I don't know what was up, but looks like they fixed something on their end.
 
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