asked many times, no real answer: manually adding album art to wav files - why isn't this possible?

The WAV format was not designed to have artwork attached to it. Probably because, at the time, no one thought it was necessary. (Don't forget, .wav was around before either the MP3 or AAC formats. Perhaps part of the reason for their design was to overcome the limitation of artwork within it!)

I don't use the store for artwork, but if you are saying that when you select Get Album Artwork (which takes you to the iTunes Store), that the store then provides the artwork from its database, then what is actually happening is that the artwork is being associated with that wav file, not made a part of it. With an MP3 or AAC file, the artwork is embeded into the file - it's made a part of the file.

Any other programme that "places artwork into a wav file" (such as Windows Media Player) is doing the same as iTunes. It's simply linking the two files together and the programme itself is remembering which artwork goes with which song or album.

Since there is no technical way to "add artwork" to a wav file, and the programme itself remembers what's where, then when that same wav file is added to a different progamme such as iTunes, the artwork does not go with it. It would appear that iTunes has already found a way round the limitation of the wav format by enabling you to add artwork via the Get Album Artwork feature.

So the hack is already there - it just doesn't hack as much as you want it to.

Wow after searching on the internet for hours I accidentally found a solution to this problems of getting artwork onto .wav files. I made an AAC copy of one of the tracks, on that track the upload album artwork was available when I right clicked Get info and I was able to upload the album artwork. After I did that I deleted the lower quality AAC copy and the artwork was not delted with it.

Voila a real solution to this ridiculous problems.

Album artwork with a .wav file yeah!!

sbphilip wrote:

Wow after searching on the internet for hours I accidentally found a solution to this problems of getting artwork onto .wav files. I made an AAC copy of one of the tracks, on that track the upload album artwork was available when I right clicked Get info and I was able to upload the album artwork. After I did that I deleted the lower quality AAC copy and the artwork was not delted with it.

Voila a real solution to this ridiculous problems.

Album artwork with a .wav file yeah!!

Note that the album artwork is in the iTunes library file, not part of the WAV file. If you move the WAV elsewhere, it will not have artwork.

sbphilip wrote:

Voila a real solution to this ridiculous problems.

Album artwork with a .wav file yeah!!

You haven't understood what I've written. Perhaps that's my fault, because I will admit, when I re-read my original reply, I could have explained it better. But the principal is there. What iTunes allows you to do is associate artwork to the album but not to the individual songs.

iTunes remembers that the artwork you have added to the wav album is for that particular album.

With an MP3, or an AAC file, the artwork is added into the individual music file, so iTunes does not need to 'remember' which artwork goes with it since it's already in the music file.

Chris CA, who has already replied to you, has said the same as I have. Read our replies carefully.

Make a note also, of what I said about the origins of wav files. The wav format is so old that, at the time, no one thought that it was necessary to have artwork in the file. There is nothing ridiculous about this at all.

When you move your wav file to another programme, such as Windows Media Player, or an Android device, it will almost certainly lose the artwork.

You may have found a way around this, I haven't specifically tested it and I doubt if I will. WAV files are not designed to have artwork in them. If you really need such a high bit rate format, there are other formats you can use which will accept artwork, such as Apple lossless.

sbphilip wrote:

Voila a real solution to this ridiculous problems.

MIcrosoft created this "rdiculuous problem"when they created teh WAV format (along with IBM).

You could convert to AIFF and add the artwork.

Vereeee NICE!!! Thank you. Then I uncheck the 256 kbps version and I have every song with an album cover, and the "bad version" won't play. I feel so empowered!!!

Thanks.

Yes you are right but it does not show on other "airplay" devices eg ipad, iphone.

I've found a SOLUTION which needs some manual steps but works pretty fine.

As described in others posts, not all albums will fetch the cover artwork automatically and, even worst, you will not be able to assign it manually afterwards (WAV).

The workaround goes as follows

- create or download an empty 1sec mp3 file

- rename it to 'cover [album].mp3'

- put this into the album's folder

- import it to your library

- assign the right information of the matching album (title, artist) so it will show up with the other songs of this album

- assign the cover art manually to this specific mp3

Then it's ready to go and you can enjoy your WAV music with artwork.

miromente wrote:

I've found a SOLUTION...

The workaround goes as follows

- create or download an empty 1sec mp3 file

- rename it to 'cover [album].mp3'

- put this into the album's folder

- import it to your library

- assign the right information of the matching album (title, artist) so it will show up with the other songs of this album

- assign the cover art manually to this specific mp3

Then it's ready to go and you can enjoy your WAV music with artwork.

But that only associates the artwork with the MP3 track, not every individual track.

In an Album View in iTunes, yes, you will see the artwork. But when you play a wav file track, no artwork will appear So when you play the WAV track, no artwork:

On this album shown below, I have one track set as an MP3 file while the rest are WAV files. As you can see, iTunes has picked up the artwork on the MP3 track and displayed it as the album artwork when looking at the album (larger view in 2.). If I play the MP3 track, the artwork is shown in the Now Playing (3.)

and if I click on the little thumbnail (3.), the display is:

But if I then play a WAV track, we have this:

and

And on my iPod Classic the same thing happens. The artwork is displayed is an "Album view" but not when an individual track is playing.

The question posed by the original poster was: "why isn't it possible to add artwork to a WAV file" and it was also stated that "the is question has been asked many times, but with no real answer".

Yes, it has been asked many times, but despite getting a real answer, far too many people choose to ignore it simply because it doesn't give them what they demand.

I know this is old, but it's the first link in Google when searching for WAV & artwork.

I want to clarify that it's not that artwork specifically can't be added to WAV, it's that WAV has no way to hold *any* metadata. So you can't write artist, song, title, genre, etc information to it. These kinds of entries just didn't cross anyones mind at the time. WAV is the audio equivalent of BMP (bitmap). It is very old and came out long before the general population was using computers to store their music.

It's like the difference between a text file and Word document file. Both are used to display text, but a word document as a container can hold a lot more additional information because the need for such a thing existed when it was created. A text file can only hold text, because that's all that was needed at the time.