iTunes Gets the Wrong Album Art

Question

iTunes Gets the Wrong Album Art

It only does this for some albums, but it's super annoying and painful.

Does anyone know why the new iTunes is getting album art for the completely wrong albums? And if there's someway to get it to get the right art automagically?

Example:
The "Ghostbusters II" soundtrack ends up with the art for Bobby Brown's "Dance Ya Know It" ( http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/dance-ya-know-it/id33895).

Smash Mouth's "All Star Smash Hits" gets the art for Microcosm Music, Vol. 1 ( http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/microcosm-music-vol-1/id159330644).

I know I can just add the correct art myself, but this makes it even worse than before. Before, I could just get a list of albums without art and then work on those. Now, I have to check the ones that have art to see if it's right.

Windows XP, iTunes 9.2.0.61

Posted on Jul 6, 2010 5:15 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 5, 2010 5:26 PM in response to The Shockwave

I'm suffering the same problem, did you find out a solution? I've added the correct images myself after doing a Google image search and it still screws up the album covers!

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Answer 2

Aug 11, 2010 11:39 AM in response to Mighty Chromedome

Kind of, but not really. iTunes is apparently really, really stupid. When it does a search for the album art to their servers, it uses the album name (makes sense) and the artist for the first track (***?). It totally ignores the "album artist" field, which would probably work a bit better.

My solution was to use this Python script: http://www.jacobweber.com/coverArt

+Cover Art: A Python script which allows you to load album covers into iTunes, without attaching them to individual song files. Works with iTunes 8.0 and higher.+

Here's what I did:
1. Disable "auto download album artwork" in the preferences. (If you follow all the steps below, you are going to be responsible for your album art from now on.)
2. Select all music files.
3. Removed the embedded album art.
4. Right click "Clear downloaded album art."
5. Right click "Get album art" (let's start fresh).
6. Go through all the albums and "clear downloaded album art" for the ones that are wrong.
7. Start the Python album art proxy (from the linky I posted).
8. Change your system's proxy settings.
9. Select the albums that don't have artwork (you can make an auto playlist that will filter by "no art").
10. Right click "Get album art." (Now, instead of the request going to Apple, it goes to the album art proxy server.)
11. Go to the album art proxy server page in your web browser.
12. Find the correct album art using Amazon (it does this for the most part by itself) or Google or a local file for each album.
13. Right click "Get album art."
14. Change your proxy settings back to normal.
15. Kill the proxy server.

Now, you have cool album art that isn't embedded in the files, so it doesn't take up as much room as if a 600x600 image was in each file. But, be warned, if you delete the file from iTunes, the art is gone also and you'll have to go through all this again.

When I add a new album/song/whatever. I right click it and try to get the art from Apple. If it gets it right, yay. If not, I use the Python script again.

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Answer 3

Sep 16, 2010 4:24 AM in response to The Shockwave

I've been struggling with the same issue for awhile. Mine were at least somewhat similar though, (*'A Very Magistery Christmas'* for *'A Very Special Christmas, Vol. 3' & 'A Very Special Christmas, Vol. 5'*) even though clicking the arrow next to the tracks takes you to the right album in the Store. When I imported them they were labeled 'A Very Special Christmas 3'(or 5). This was done under iTunes 7, so, awhile ago.
No matter what I did, it came up with the same Artwork. I even tried changing the 'Album' to "Wrong Artwork" & it got the same wrong artwork. This made me certain that the problem had something to do with the tags.
Now, I use a number of different Media Library Programs, including iTunes, Zune, & Foobar2K. In the past I have also used Media Monkey, Songbird, as well as the stupid ones that come with the cheap Coby, Sony, RCA, etc. MP3 players. I have a lot of Non-Popular music that isn't on iTunes, but I prefer to use the iTunes Artwork when available & I prefer iTunes in general for my library management, but one big issue that iTunes has it that it will sometimes read an MP3 with a ID3v2.4 tag &, when edited, write an ID3v2.3 tag next to the 2.4 tag. This causes a lot of problems since some, like Foobar, ignore everything but the highest tag & iTunes prefers the 2.3 so any edits don't transfer. I've dealt with those problems & used MP3tag to convert to APE, Delete all ID3 tags, & write new ID3s in v2.3. This also didn't fix anything.
So, using MP3tag, I went deeper. I selected the whole album, went to the extended tags & noticed the stack of iTunes Comment fields. For some reason, iTunes likes to write a dozen different 'Comment' fields. That's why when you delete random jumbled comments, they appear to come back, because without a Comment field, the next one down that starts with 'COMMENT' takes its place.
******
*So, TO FIX THE PROBLEM, Delete all the _Extended Tags_ beginning with COMMENT (For me 'COMMENT ITUNES CDDBIDS', 'COMMENT ITUNNORM', 'COMMENT ITUNPGAP', 'COMMENT ITUNSMPB'), There shouldn't be a problem leaving the one that's just 'COMMENT'. Then go back to iTunes & +Right-Click > 'Get Album Artwork'+*

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