Upload Artwork to Gracenote?

Gracenote does not store cover art, only artist, album and track info.

There is no single repository of album art that you can upload to. Most of the 3rd party utilities search Amazon for cover art. The best you could do is to upload it to your web site or to a site such as Flickr or Photobucket and make people aware that it is there.

Apple does not (officially) monitor these discussion boards.

No offense intended, but I think there might be some fundamental confusion on your part. Gracenote does not store any cover art at all, AFAIK. If they do, then it would be submitted in the same way that all other CD and track information is submitted.

There is also currently no mechanism in iTunes to add cover art to ripped CDs by using the artwork from the iTunes Music Store. Because music in the iTunes Music Store is added by agreement between Apple and the record companies, there is no way for an end-user to submit artwork to any sort of iTunes database. If your friends' music is available on the iTunes Music Store, I assume that their record label has already made arrangements with Apple to provide cover art.

Jeff--

Sorry, I realize Gracenote does not hold cover art,
but iTunes does. I assume Apple monitors this group???

Actually, these are user-to-user forums, and Apple doesn't monitor them from the standpoint of answering questions or getting feedback.

As for the artwork, the artwork is stored in the music file itself. That's why iTunes can't change the artwork on certain files, there's no mechanism for saving it in the file itself.

If you buy a track from the iTunes Music Store, the artwork is already loaded in the file by the record company or whoever sent the song file to the iTunes Music Store.

For songs taken off CD, iTunes currently doesn't have a way to automatically get artwork for tracks. The end user would have to have some kind of plug-in or script for that. Since Gracenote doesn't store the artwork, and it's not part of the CD itself, iTunes has no place to get the artwork.

charlie

While there are several databases of textual data ( Gracenote, MusicBrainz, FreeDB), there is none for artwork. the iTunes Music Store is licensed to provide you with artwork when you buy something. A service that provides artwork would probably run into legal copyright problems and might likely be shut down by the media companies.

As mentioned, Apple developers do not monitor these fora. If you want to send them ideas, use the Mac OS X Feedback form.

I was just as surprised to find Gracenote allowing anybody to upload track names when it doesn't exist (or sometimes even if it does)

All three of the major databases are based on user submissions. Gracenote is the only one to have gone commercial. Because they are based on user submissions, you will find lots of errors in all three databases. I do not know what measures Gracenote takes to resolve errors and duplicates, but I do know that MusicBrainz and FreeDB are working to eliminate them. MusicBrainz also allows importing of data from FreeDB.

Indeed. There's a free third party application called Clutter that does exactly this. Nifty little program. You can use it to drag album covers on to your desktop to launch into that album or song. Alternately, when you're ripping a CD, you can let it look up the right cover, highlight the songs ripped in your library and hit Cmd-Shift-K to copy the cover into your mp3s.

Excellent app...

http://www.sprote.com/clutter/


-MB