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Way to easily retrieve album art for iTunes?

A

asdfTT123

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 1, 2007
159
1
I have a bunch of songs without album art...I was wondering if there's an application out there that will go through my music, look up the album art, and edit it into my songs. Does anything like this exist? Thanks.
 
I tried this, but it was all screwed up. Instead, I just took a few hours to look up all my albums on Amazon.com and just drag the album art into iTunes after selecting all the songs. (I really didn't have anything better to do, honest).
 
asdfTT123 said:
I have a bunch of songs without album art...I was wondering if there's an application out there that will go through my music, look up the album art, and edit it into my songs. Does anything like this exist? Thanks.
Click to expand...

Am I missing something?? iTunes has this feature built-in now.

I think it grabs all the album art from the itunes store. It scans your whole library so its a slow process, and the UI isn't very good, but it worked well for me.
 
savar said:
Am I missing something?? iTunes has this feature built-in now.

I think it grabs all the album art from the itunes store. It scans your whole library so its a slow process, and the UI isn't very good, but it worked well for me.
Click to expand...

The problem with this is that you HAVE to sign up with an iTunes account, which involves entering a card number. It means Apple can claim that more people use the store, but people without cards / who don't want to use iTunes store are out of luck.
 
pjrobertson said:
The problem with this is that you HAVE to sign up with an iTunes account, which involves entering a card number. It means Apple can claim that more people use the store, but people without cards / who don't want to use iTunes store are out of luck.
Click to expand...

Could someone walk me through the process through iTunes? I have an iTunes account. A lot of the music was not purchased from the iTunes store...will they charge me for using their service? Thanks.
 
pjrobertson said:
The problem with this is that you HAVE to sign up with an iTunes account, which involves entering a card number. It means Apple can claim that more people use the store, but people without cards / who don't want to use iTunes store are out of luck.
Click to expand...

Could someone walk me through the process through iTunes? I have an iTunes account. A lot of the music was not purchased from the iTunes store...will they charge me for using their service? Thanks.
 
Corripio will do it automatically (though takes a while).
Clutter will do it auto/manually and enter artwork for entire albums.
iTunes does it easiest, though you need an account, but it will not charge you for anything. It will get artwork for any files in your library, doesn't matter if you bought them, stole them, or ripped them.
 
The way I do it...

... I have to admit that I use limewire once in a while
when you do that you don't get the full song info most of the time

so what I do
(Hate me for this)

is I manually edit the
1. Artist
2. Song Name
3. Album Name
so they're correct.

If all that information is correct,
then just control click in the coverflow window and select "Get Album Artowrk"

viola!
it should work
;-)
 
asdfTT123 said:
Could someone walk me through the process through iTunes? I have an iTunes account. A lot of the music was not purchased from the iTunes store...will they charge me for using their service? Thanks.
Click to expand...

This isn't going to work if the album isn't in the ITunes Music Store (iTMS.) I run into the same problem myself with CDs that I rip and copy into iTunes that are not available in the iTMS. That is where some of the utilities that others have mentioned in this thread some into play.

But to make sure you have iTunes setup correctly to download any cover art that is available, simply click on the GENERAL tab in preferences and make sure "automatically download missing album artwork" is selected. This will set it up going forward. Then from the ADVANCED menu, click GET ALBUM ARTWORK to get the artwork that is available in your current library. This is not a speedy process so plan on it taking awhile.

SCR
 
The problem with letting iTunes grab them from the store is that it doesn't embed the artwork in the music files. So, if you're like me, and you have multiple computers accessing the same music on a shared drive, they won't automatically appear on the other computers. They'll need to go through the same process.

Same deal when it comes time to get a new computer. Unless you manage to successfully transfer your library file and get it working (not always easy), the artwork will be gone.

I like to take the time to do it manually, so the artwork is forever attached to the files, no matter where they go. Decide to ditch Mac/iTunes and go Windows/WinAmp? No problem. Artwork is still there.

Video tutorial.
 
I didnt know iTunes doesnt embed the art, but that makes sense.

The problem I have with Amazon is a lot of the artwork is crap quality wise. Google images gives you more options so you can better resolution.

Has anyone had any problems with finding an album in the ITMS but not being able to get iTunes to find the album? This seems to happen with soundtracks a lot.
 
pjrobertson said:
The problem with this is that you HAVE to sign up with an iTunes account, which involves entering a card number. It means Apple can claim that more people use the store, but people without cards / who don't want to use iTunes store are out of luck.
Click to expand...
There are other options than entering your credit card. I have never linked a credit card number to my iTMS account. Instead, I set my own account up initially with an iTunes gift card. Also, when Starbucks recently had the "Starbucks Card Plus 2" gift cards with two free iTunes downloads I used one of those to setup my son's iTunes account -- specifically so he could download album art for his CDs from iTunes.
 
I use the Amazon artwork widget also.

One point though: Make sure you have the song selected in iTunes(or shift-click and select all the songs for an ablum) when you click the "set as album art" button on the widget, otherwise it will attach it to whatever song you have selected ;)

Hope that helps.

Oh, here's the link from Apple:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/music/amazonalbumart.html

Edit: Another way to do it is Google Image the album name, download the pic, select "get info" on the song in iTunes and select the image file...sucks doing it manually like that, but it's worth it to have all the covers IMO.
 
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