Adding cover art to Audible book files

Hi all,

I have a lot of Audible audiobooks. I find that the cover art embedded in the files to be too small. They look blurry in iTunes cover flow mode. It is my understanding that there are two levels of cover art in iTunes. One is the image embedded into the files themselves. The other level, iTunes just associates the cover art to the file but doesn't embed it.

It seems that the images embedded into audible .aa files cannot be updated. However, I have found a way to change the cover art. If I select two or more Audible and do a Get Info, I just paste the new cover art. This changes what artwork is shown for the books or book parts. However, it seems that after I do this, the "modified" audiobooks are resynced every time I put the iPod into its cradle.

As long as I keep the iPod in its cradle, the Apple Universal iPod dock, the 160GB iPod Classic only syncs new items. But, remove it and re-insert, it again resyncs the Audible audiobooks with the modified cover art. As you may guess, the new cover art doesn't show up on the iPod, just the embedded Audible cover art.

I don't mind the cover art that I associate with the .aa files don't sync to the iPod. I just don't want the books to resync each time. We are talking about 100+ books most with multiple parts.

I stopped this resyncing by selecitng all of the "modified" books and then clearing the cover art. After one more sync of lots of books, the books defaulted back to embedded images and stopped the continuous resyncing issue. However, I lost the cover art. Well, I know where I got it from so I can put it back if can resolve this issue.

Does anyone know how to associate cover art with Audible .aa files but not cause the resyncing issue? Oh, of course, I want all of the cover art of the non-Audible items to keep showing up on the iPod. 🙂 Can I have my cake and eat it too?

And, yes, I am using the latest version of iTunes.

Any ideas will be appreciated.

Thanks!
Steven