Time Saving Tuesday
Album art seems to be the hot new craze these days, and with Apple’s Cover Flow (pictured below) more people want their library of music to be filled with gorgeous artwork. Cover Flow has changed the way that I find songs to listen to, and for that reason I wanted to show how you can use iTunes to retrieve your favorite album art.
Before we jump in we want to point out that there are numerous ways that you can add album art to your music collection, including the free MediaMonkey. This article only focuses on iTunes, but we’ll likely cover other ways in the future.
Below you’ll find instructions on having iTunes automatically fetch the album artwork, how to manually add it yourself, how to add it in bulk, and forcing iTunes to store album art in the music files. The end result will be a beautiful looking library filled with flowing album art…
–Automatically Adding Album Art–
Assuming that you have correctly added the tag information (artist, title, album, etc…) iTunes will be able to retrieve artwork for your songs automatically. Of course this relies on the album actually being sold on iTunes, which is currently a problem for artists such as the Beatles.
To force iTunes to grab the artwork for an album just right click on the song(s) and select the Get Album Artwork:
One big issue I’ve had with this working is when dealing with compilation albums or soundtracks. Any albums that have various artists on them will likely be unable to download no matter what you try to do, unless you’ve actually purchased the songs from iTunes.
The album art that iTunes downloads is stored in a special folder created by the application, and is kept separate from the music itself.
–Manually Adding Album Art–
One thing that I’m impressed with is how easily you can manually add album art in iTunes. The nice thing about manually adding the album art is that iTunes will embed it into the song itself, which is actually a nice feature. That way the artwork will be available in applications other than iTunes.
Here’s what you have to do:
- Find the image that you want to use as the album art. I recommend doing a Google image search for the album name, looking on Wikipedia, or pulling up the Amazon page.
- Once you’ve found a good quality image just right-click on it and copy the image. No, you don’t have to save it to your hard drive.
- Now go find the song you want to add the artwork to, right-click on it, and select Get Info. Switch to the Artwork tab, click in the blank box, and press Ctrl+V to paste the artwork in that you copied.
- Hit the OK button on the window, and you’re done. The album art has been embedded in that particular song.
–Bulk Adding Album Art–
If you have a ton of songs from the same album there is an easier way to add the same artwork in bulk. This isn’t entirely necessary to do since iTunes only requires one song in a particular album to have artwork associated with it, but other applications may like to have each individual song tagged with artwork.
In iTunes select all of the songs that pertain to the same album, which can be done using the standard Control and Shift keys while clicking on songs with your mouse. After that you’ll pretty much follow the same instructions for manually adding the artwork above, but the area for you to paste the album art into is in a different spot:
–Embedding iTunes Album Art–
The album art that iTunes automatically retrieves is not embedded in the songs, which means that it will not be available outside of iTunes. Some of you may not mind that, but if you enjoy having the artwork no matter what application you’re using then you’ll want to go through these steps for each of the albums:
Note: This is unnecessary for any album art that you’ve manually added yourself.
- Right-click on a song and click Get Info.
- Go to the Artwork tab and press Ctrl+C to copy the artwork.
- Now press Ctrl+V to paste it back in.
- Hit the OK button.
When you copy and paste the album art in steps 2 & 3 you won’t really see anything happen, but you can easily verify that it worked by monitoring the date modified and/or filesize of the song. If you can see an increase in the filesize then the album art has been added.
It might take some time to get your library just the way you like it, but once you’re done the result will look great… especially for those using Cover Flow.
That’s again for a great tip Ryan. I was wondering how to do this since I got my Mac. I used Windows Media Player when I was using Windows. It was a lot easier to add the artwork in that.
My album art is located in each album folder on my drive. It bugs me that iTunes can’t see/use that art (since many other programs have no issues using it this way.)
Since my iPod Mini doesn’t support album art, it makes no sense to have the art embedded in the file, since it will just take up space.
So, is there a way to get iTunes to find the album art WITHOUT embedding it to the MP3 files?
the first option works only if you have iTunes account, basically meaning you have to be from some of the few countries that have iTunes store.
for the rest, use MediaMonkey or Winamp
awesome tip… glad to see you guys are green day fans as well!
I haven’t seen any way to do that, sorry.
Huge Green Day fans!
Greenday is Shit, poser.
Zune software used to auto find album art, and let you manually find it as well. Zune 2 unfortunately killed that feature, though. There’s a box to allow it to auto find art in Zune options, but w/ it enabled it still doesn’t find it at all. Kinda annoying.
Huh, I wonder why they would remove such a useful feature?
Good tips but I prefer to use my Winamp Player. I just modify the IDTag for my mp3´s. But thanks for all the advice focused to iTunes.
The way i got my art work is by saving in to my computer and then I copy it on artwork on itunes the problem is when I plug in my ipod will my art work erase? please reply or send me an email thanks
No, you’re artwork should not be erased if you followed the instructions I mentioned here.
Hey Ryan I have a question? my friend told me that if you download songs to itunes to your ipod from a certain artist and then you want to add more song from the same artist in the future do the song that you donloaded to itunes do they erase? I use frostwire to get my song then I transfer them to itunes thank
I’m not sure if I completely understand what you’re after. iTunes will erase all the songs on your iPod the first time you sync it, but it will replace the songs with those in your iTunes library. Each successive sync will not wipe out your songs though.
I’m not sure if that’s the answer you were after.
I have a question, too
I have 10 songs on one album and 9 of them are played just by the main artist and 1 is played by that artist featuring someone else. I put them all under the same album name and same album artist but when I browse with cover flow on my iPod two albums appear, one with the name of the main artist underneath and one with the name of that artist featuring someone. Is there a way I could leave the correct artist names for each song but that I can have it all under one album? And I don’t wanna use Compilations because then it says Various artists instead of the main artist name.
easy fix. first, select both songs either using shift-click, or command-click (via macs).
then bring up the song info for both songs and where it says “Album Artist” type in the primary artist of that album. that should fix your problem
THANKS MEGA-MUCH FOR THE ARTWORK TIP! now i can coverflow with the best of them!… lol
Hey thanks alot for the itunes artwork tips, I would have NEVER figured it out myself,,,Thanks
i put a album art in my list of songs but still they are not sort in one album they seperated…..
Anyone had any problems with iTunes adding a jumble of letters and numbers into their comments and erasing the last number of the track number on some of the songs that have artwork with them?
Anonymous,
I used to have part of that problem (numbers in the comment section). I did three things that were suggested to avoid that problem, as well as to avoid losing your atrwork.
1) I save the IDtag as v2.3. Right click on a song or set of songs, then select “convert id tag”. On the first prompt, chose v2.3
2) If you also have the Windows Media player on your machine, make sure that you go into the TOOLS/Privacy section and unclick the UPDATE MUSIC FILES option. I found that Media Player woudl overwrite my ITunes data.
3) I type “ART” into the comment section to avoid all those weird numbers from showing. It also helps me track which songs still needs artwork when I sort the comments section.
i’m not like a regular on this site or anything i just googled it because i needed to know how to do something but i just wanted to say thanks because it really helped me with what i wanted, so thanks loads
xx
Thank you very much. I always looking for that.
Ha, and you people think Macs are so great. Nice frikken application can’t even find album art!
I have added the artwork manually to each track, just as you said in your instructions. When I play them on my iPod Nano New Generation, there is no artwork at all, either from cover flow or when the track is playing, I just get the default musical note.
Any ideas guys?
Thank you so much for this tip!! I have wasted so much time trying to figure this out on my own.
Wuhu, Zune 3.1 software has album art finding back, and it does it quickly and easily right in the background.
Side note, I was just listening to music on my very powerful laptop when song started skipping/lagging. I look at my sidebar and see CPU gadget at 100%!!! I check task manager and see ZuneEnc.exe using all my processor. Eventually, I figured out it was transcoding all my videos in background for when sync w/ Zune. Well, I wanted to listen to music w/out lagging up my PC, so I found option to turn off background video conversion. Low CPU again, aaah.
24!!!
Like the guys above, a very big thanks for this useful post.
I had heard about iTunes being funny about file management but didn’t expect it to be so daft. At least with Media Player you can click-and-drag artwork onto your albums.
Question: most of my music is compilation, dance albums usually. iTunes and Coverflow have multiple instances of these albums needlessly scattered all over the place. Is there a post on this – or other site – to sort this quickly, or do I have to manually edit each track/album details.
Hi there,
I have about 500 albums ripped using Windows Media Player. I imported the songs in iTunes and it converted from wma to mp3 file. I all worked great until I wanted to import artwork but iTunes tells me it can’t do that since the album was not imported with iTunes. Is there a way to still automatically add album art?
Thanks a bunch.
Maraming Salamat !!!!
Thanks!
THNX MAN!!!!!
Thanks for the info. I have wondered how to do this.
Hi. I thought I was going crazy with all the artwork. great post
keep on the great job
P.
thanks a load man. i have literally spent hours trying to do this by self
Great Post many thanks
I have the same iPod Nano and problem as Dan reported on January 7th.
Can somebody help us?
I have added the artwork manually to each track, just as you said in your instructions. When I play them on my iPod Nano New Generation, there is no artwork at all, either from cover flow or when the track is playing, I just get the default musical note.
Any ideas guys?
Dan et al.
FYI I solved the problem by using the “–Bulk Adding Album Art–” method rather than doing each title separately.
One thing I noticed; if you happen to be listening to the song when you embed the artwork the song will pause for a second. That is another way you can tell the art had been embedded.
Hi,
I have itunes 8. I have followed your instruction, but get stuck when i go to ‘GET INFO’, i have no ARTWORK tab.
Any ideas. Thanks in advance.
For the previous entry, you need to select a song from the song list on that album, do not select the album. Display your song list to find one.
Excellent answers with clear instructions resulting in the desired effect. Thanks so much. If you don’t have an artwork tab, right click anywhere in the artwork image box and select paste.
Hey
I have recently purchased a macbook pro and when I have transferred all my albums from my PC I have lost all my album artwork except for on the albums/singles which i have purchased from itunes. I have tried adding the artwork on bulk but it says that it can’t find any of them.
Any ideas on how I can get the artwork back without having to manually add them all?
Thank you, quick and easy instructions
That was FUN!!! THANKS…..THANKS….
However, when i repasted another cover on some songs after I deleted the previous pasted artwork as I did not like the look of it. When I sync, those repasted covers remain blank. I went over it again,won’t work. Please clue me in…
Searching images on Google/Amazon would still take a lot of time.
You know what is easier still?
Go here:
[art4itunes.com]
Saved me a lot of time. And I have 90% of my artwork on my i-pod now, in a matter of 1 hour. Of course, you gotta add it manually!
One question pertaining to the copy and pasting… my computer can copy and paste regular pictures like into a word document, but it won’t let me copy and paste anything into my itunes library? What is the problem?
Thanks a heap mate!
thanks soo much for your help!