I recently installed I-tunes. Some of my CDs (in wav format) attached album art to the files after I ran get info, and others did not. I can find the album art online and manually save it to the albums if necessary, but cannot figure out how to save album art to a wav file - only to mp3 files.
Windows XP
I had the same problem 2 years ago when purchased my first mac. I researched every possible solution. The only way is to convert your .WAV file to another format (MP3, AAC, etc.)
If like myself, you are picky about having a lossless format of your music files, then convert them to .AIFF. This is another lossless format which can be converted back and forth from .WAV without compromising any quality. When you do the conversion either way, just make sure you set the settings to auto or the highest quality (BitRate = 1411 kbps , SampleRate = 44.100 kHz)
As stated, iTunes can't generally attach custom artwork to .wav files. If you're lucky it can sometimes assoicate store art but you have no real control over what will and won't get art. Another drawback with .wav files is that with no tag if the file ever gets disocnnected from your library you can lose information relating to it such as Artist and Album.
You may get best performance by converting your existing files to Apple Lossless with this ConvertToFormat script.
tt2
After I ran your script to label my wav files with the song info in I-tunes, I was able to right click and select get info & get album artwork, and was able to get album artwork for many of my CDs, but a lot of them also said could not find info. So I now know I can save album artwork to the CD tracks (although it doesn't stay with the song, it is only on this computer) - I'm trying to figure out how I can take a pic of the album art off the internet and save it on this computer as album art for those songs. I do not want to convert any of my wav files to a compressed format.
I was suggesting you set your Import Settings to Apple Lossless and convert to that format. The files are supposed to be significantly smaller than the corresponding .wav but using a lossless rather than lossy compression method so no audio quality is lost. In princliple wav > Apple Lossless > wav should give the original audio data. Using Apple Lossless (or AIFF) format you can have the original CD audio quality together with any custom artwork you copy and paste from the web.
Test out a single album, not using my ConvertFormat script but the iTunes "Create XXX version" tool (set import settings, select tracks, right-click), and compare the before and after quality. If you're happy with the results the benefit of using my script to process other .wav tracks is that the converted files will inherit ratings, play counts, playlist membership and the originals are sent to the recycle bin so that you don't have to manually clean up.
tt2
Kevin Silver that is what I was trying to explain: no Conversion = no Artwork (for some tracks) 🙂
iTunes only recognizes and portrays artwork for those albums that are availavle to sell on iTunes Store. For the remaning tracks, you must convert them. No other way around this.
I chose .AIFF over Apple Lossless since it's compatibility seems to be very similar to .WAV, as opposed to Apple Lossless which is mostly only compatible with Apple products.
Ciao ciao
If you absolutely do not want to convert, here's a way you can at least get the most out of it:
- go to iTunes Store
- search a desired track/album
- note the precise character-by-character spelling of the album/song/artist names in iTunes Store
- match your track/album's info to the one in iTunes store
- you may then right-click on your track and hit "Get Artwork" again
For instance, I had an album named "In White Rooms EP Vol 2", which was spelled in iTunes Store as "In White Rooms, Vol. 2 - Single". Changing the name enabled iTunes to recognize the album
screen shot
That works for just about all of my WAV-based playlists... but there are some that the iTunes Store doesn't carry, such as "The Essential Dionne Warwick" or the most recent Gentle Giant box set. I buy the CD, then import to iTunes in WAV format. I guess I may have to rethink that strategy.
Adding artwork for wav files
