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I can't get album artwork!

I am currently ripping my Rush collection into AIFF format (please don't criticize) and all albums except Moving Pictures are getting proper artwork.

So, this crucial album of the collection, Moving Pictures, is the only one without artwork.

I tried the "(Remastered)" trick which had worked on my Queen collection. Stil didn't work.

Then I tried to view its page through the "Ping" button. It gives me this infamous error:


User uploaded file

"The item you've requested is not currently available in the US store."


The problem is this:

User uploaded file

I can view the iTunes page fine if I click there.


Can anyone help? It's really annoying, and I'm afraid that this might happen with my Pink Floyd collection, too. Thanks!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7), 2011 15" 2.2Ghz Quad Core, 8GB RAM

Posted on Oct 1, 2011 9:54 PM

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Posted on Oct 2, 2011 10:09 AM

I believe the iTunes Store and the feature that labels your CDs don't use exactly the same database. If there is even the slightest (sometimes almost invisble like a slightly different font) difference in the labeling of the tracks between the two then problems can arise in finding items. Try copying the artist, album artist, and/or album name labels used in the store to a file and see if it then finds it.

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Oct 2, 2011 10:09 AM in response to Prodo123

I believe the iTunes Store and the feature that labels your CDs don't use exactly the same database. If there is even the slightest (sometimes almost invisble like a slightly different font) difference in the labeling of the tracks between the two then problems can arise in finding items. Try copying the artist, album artist, and/or album name labels used in the store to a file and see if it then finds it.

Oct 2, 2011 11:36 AM in response to Limnos

Thanks for the reply.

All of my songs are tagged to exactly match their iTunes counterparts (even to capitalization 😝) so I was kind of surprised to see certain albums fail to retrieve artwork.


Also, I found that Pink Floyd's The Wall and Wish You Were Here are getting the same issues. Again, they have impeccable tags.

Oct 3, 2011 8:44 AM in response to Prodo123

Sorry I can't help you any farther. 90% of my music collection isn't even in the iTunes music store so I don't bother with the fetch artwork feature (I don't even have an ITMS account) and just do a Google image search.


I know I have found iTunes to do inexplicable things in terms of interpreting tags. I have had items that would not group together even though I had copied and pasted both artist and album fields from one track to another. If I then added an "x" to the end of the fields it would group them. If I selected the group, got info., and removed the "x" it would then group them, though in a few cases they would go back to not grouping together even though they would with the "x" there! I can only surmise you are seeing something similar.

Oct 4, 2011 11:52 AM in response to Prodo123

Hello Prodo 123,

I just downloaded successfully the artwork for Rush: Moving Pictures, if that's the artwork you were looking for. User uploaded file

I selected the album in the iTunes store, ctrl-clicked on the cover, copied the URL from the pop up menu and opended the page in Safari.

Then , in the iTunes Browser - I set the album and all the track names exactly as displayed on the web page by copying from the web page, set the Artist to "Rush", set the Album-Artist to "Rush", and set the album name to "Moving Pictures".

I noticed quite often that it is very important to get the track names right and to set the album artist.


Good luck

Léonie

Oct 5, 2011 12:06 AM in response to Prodo123

Look here: http://web.me.com/dreschler/Leonie/MovingPictures.png


Copy it, while Mobile Me still exists ...


I am very puzzled, there must be something different the way you are trying to download the artwork. Do you get an error message or does it just not work?

Two things I noticed:

  • If iTunes does not reconize one of the tracks, it will not apply the artwork to any of the tracks. So I retry to download the artwork for just one of the tracks (that has a simple track name in iTunes, without "remastered" or special characters), and if that succeeds, I copy the artwork manually to the other tracks.
  • iTunes will not download artwork, if the song already has some artwork, so you have to clear the old artwork before you try to download artwork.

Oct 5, 2011 11:21 PM in response to léonie

1. I have confirmed that iTunes recognizes The Wall and Wish You Were Here; the Ping button sends me to the iTunes Store without fail. However, iTunes does not recognize Moving Pictures in its entirety, and gives me the "not available in US store" error. That is the only error message I am getting.


2. I found out that Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports is the same way as Pink Floyd; it's recognized by iTunes but the store refuses to send the artwork over.


3. For the ones recognized by iTunes but have no artwork: The retrieval process takes less than a microsecond, is over in a flash, and have no artwork in the end. Successful albums take at least 2 seconds. The only plausible explanation for this would be that Apple is blocking the artwork from being retrieved, or the server is unreachable.

Oct 6, 2011 12:09 AM in response to Prodo123

I found out that Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports is the same way as Pink Floyd; it's recognized by iTunes but the store refuses to send the artwork over.


3. For the ones recognized by iTunes but have no artwork: The retrieval process takes less than a microsecond, is over in a flash, and have no artwork in the end. Successful albums take at least 2 seconds. The only plausible explanation for this would be that Apple is blocking the artwork from being retrieved, or the server is unreachable.



I really don't think it is likely that the store will send the artwork to me, but refuse to send it to you, if the songs have the same title and album - there must be something wrong with songs in your library.


I could retrieve the cover at the first attempt and put it on my iDisk for you:

http://web.me.com/dreschler/Leonie/BrianEnoAmbient.png


Were you able to download the other cover I posted for you?


In your first post you mentioned that you are ripping the songs as aiff. Maybe some of your aiff's are corrupted and just can't store artwork.

Two things to try:

  • Create a aac-version of one of the stubborn songs and try to get the artwork again, just for that aac-version of the song. If that succeeds, you will know that the audio format causes the problem
  • Copy a cover from one song that has a cover and try to add it to your song manually. If you can't assign a cover this way, then it probably will also be impossible with the covers downloaded from the iTunes store.

Oct 7, 2011 1:53 AM in response to Prodo123

Prodo123 wrote:


he AIFF files have low-quality substitute files that I downloaded and embedded through iTunes.


Hello Prodo123,

that might be the problem. As I said in my earlyier post, you really have to remove any old artwork before you try download artwork from the iTunes store. Otherwise your request will just be ignored. So when you try again to download Pink Floyd, just clear any old artwork before you use the "Get Artwork" command.

Cheers

Léonie

I can't get album artwork!

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