Album vs playlist

Some of your questions may be answered in:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/inside-itunes/2010/08/customizing-your-album-artwork -in-itunes.html

I don't know for sure but iTunes probably looks in the album field of the track information and compares that with listing of albums in the store and provides that artwork if there's a match.

Playlists are totally different from albums. You can add just about anything to a playlist. I have playlists where there's 20 songs from 20 different albums.

An album is loosely a collection of tracks with the same album name. More specifically if the tracks also all have the same *Album Artist* or Artist values or have *Part of a compilation* set true then it will be considered as an album. Playlists are really for gathering together tracks from different albums in an order of your choosing whereas albums generally match an original CD.

I don't know the detailed mechanism behind *Get Album Artwork* but it can occasionally fetch the wrong art, or none at all, even when the iTunes Store sells the album. Sometimes a careful misspelling of the album name is required to coax iTunes into recognizing the album, although it's probably much easier to seek the assistance of your preferred web search engine.

See my article on Grouping Tracks Into Albums for more details on albumness.

tt2