Getting Album Art with iTunes, a few really important tips
Many people seem to have issues importing Album Art into
songs, albums, etc. in all versions of iTunes. There is one thing that people
seem to overlook that makes a big difference when importing album art. You need
to login to iTunes with your Apple ID first.
You must have at least the “Song Title”, “Album Title”, “Album
Artist”, “Genre” and the “Release Year” correct for iTunes to be able to accurately
match the cover to the song.
(It helps to have track list number correct as well. And disk
number if the album has more than one disk)
Also remember that iTunes cannot find all album art for
every song ever written, but can find a lot more than most people think provided it has accurate info to work with.
Here is a couple of examples of what will work and what most
likely won’t work when you click on “Get Album Artwork”:
Correct:
Title: Chain Saw
#: 1
Artist: Ramones
Album Artist: Ramones
Album: All the Stuff (And More) Volume One
Genre: Punk rock
Year: 1990
Incorrect:
Title: Chain Saw
#: 1
Artist: Ramones
Album Artist: Ramones
Album: All the Stuff (And More) Vol. 1
Genre: Punk rock
Year: 1990
The song information needs to be correct in spelling as well
in punctuation. Blank fields are not good either. It can be a long tedious
process to fix all the bad information in songs downloaded from the internet or
from your cd’s etc. Many times, information is missing when ripping a cd.
I have about 40,000 songs spread out in 8 separate libraries
and I spent a lot of time fixing all the info and album art. If this is too
much hassle then buy the songs new from Apple Music. Most of my collection I
have had for years. I have thousands of CDs and vinyl albums and they take up a
lot of space. Much easier to deal with your music in iTunes. You can use Shazam
to identify unknown songs and then Google for the album art as well as song info
if iTunes doesn’t have it.
This applies to iTunes for Mac as well as iTunes for Windows
I hope this helps somebody, I may add more later as I typed
this up in 10 minutes and most likely will need to revise it later. Please feel
free to let me know if anything above is inaccurate.