iTunes no longer fetches album art from foreign iTunes stores

[kisskisskiss]

I haven't been able to retrieve album art for the iTunes store for albums that aren't available in the US iTunes store for a few days, so I sent in a support request and got this reply:

Laura here, from the iTunes Store. I have received your most recent request regarding your album artwork. I can certainly appreciate any concerns in this matter. I would be more than happy to further assist you today.

Unfortunately, if the content you are importing into iTunes is not on the iTunes Store that your account country is from, iTunes will not recognize it and you wont be able to grab the album artwork from another country.

Now, I can't tell if I got an incompetent support staffer or if this is actually a planned change in the way the iTunes store works, but if this is true I'm really disappointed. Is anyone else experiencing similar issues?

 

[Galley]

I've been able to download artwork from foreign stores but I can't say for sure the last time it happened.

 

[kisskisskiss]

Bumped as I just received another email from the same customer support person. Apparently this is an intentional change. I can't say I understand why.

Is anyone still able to download artwork from foreign iTunes stores?

 

[granbajo]

Bumped as I just received another email from the same customer support person. Apparently this is an intentional change. I can't say I understand why.

Is anyone still able to download artwork from foreign iTunes stores?

It explains why I haven't been able to get some artwork recently. Anyway, adding it from other websites is relatively straightforward... just select all the songs and do ⌘-I or Ctrl-I depending on your platform and just drag it from a website. I usually do it from amazon.com, discogs of even the wikipedia. I look for the best one and do it.

 

[kisskisskiss]

Yeah, I know… I just liked the high-res iTunes art, and, you know, the ease of it all. Plus I liked not having the art embedded in the file itself- I know it doesn't matter now but I liked the idea that I was keeping my files bloat-free. Mostly I liked the better quality of the art downloaded from the iTunes store, though.

The last email I got from the iTunes support staff (after getting a ton of store credits I didn't want- don't give me free stuff, iTunes! it's nice but it's NOT what I want) told me:

"Until they get this sorted, go to Gracenote."

I'm hoping they're actually going to, well, get it sorted. Gracenote doesn't have half the stuff iTunes does.