iTunes 11: No more album art preview for selected track??? :(

FWIW my iTunes library backs up every night to a 2TB external drive using SilverKeeper. It's the free backup utility that came with LaCie hard drives (no more apparently, but a quick Google search and you'll find it). It works fine on Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion. It's great 'cause it compares libraries and only backs up what's changed, removes files not present in the source, so the nightly backup is very fast - but you can launch iTunes from the backup. I think it's a good idea to have several library backups in multiple locations.

Seriously! iTunes needs to bring back the artwork that used to be displayed on the bottom left corner. I liked seeing the album artwork. It just enhanced the look and I liked it better that way. PLEASE BRING BACK THE ALBUM ARTWORK LIKE BEFORE! 😠

I'm a very visual leaner/memory person. So not being able to see my album art work in the "Song" very is almost a handicap. I dont know what any songs or albums are anymore. Im very seriously considering ditching iTunes because this feature was removed.

I wonder how many posts need to be made in this thread before Apple will notice...if they ever will.

So, they're halfway there. Apple still need to restore the bottom left-hand album artwork preview window.

Cheers,

Craig.

Update doesn't come close to cutting it. What I liked about the bottom left hand artwork preview menu was the ability to DRAG artwork to and from that window.

Just installed iTunes 11.0.3. Indeed you can force display of artwork in songs view, but you can't drag artwork in if there is none, and when you drag from the art display you get the full song, not the artwork.

The only time you can drag artwork to a song is when you're playing it.

If you want to manage a large library of music, you still want to avoid iTunes 11.

Really? So it seems update is mainly cosmetic and still doesn't improve it much in terms of album art management.

Thanks verbcrunch. This saved me the pain of a rollback.

I'm wondering if I wanted to test iTunes 11.0.3 using another user account on the same machine, does that overwrite the iTunes 10.7 on my administrator account?

Not true. Select all the songs you want to add artwork to. Get Info. Drag artwork from your desktop to the Artwork window. When you click OK artwork will be added to each track in turn.

Before you say you can't add additional artwork, you can. For each track that you want to add additional things like notes or alternate covers, select the track. Get Info and go to the last tab Artwork. You can deposit a collection of files in there.

I realize there are no arrows in the main view to switch around. But you can determine which file shows in the individual track by the order it is in. You can click and drag the files around and change that.

Get info is glacial when all you want to do is manage artwork. Get info is for managing all of a song's tags and options - artwork just being one of many components. Get info can take several seconds to load, even when the library and OS are on Solid State Drives.

True you can still use Get Info to manage artwork, but the old album art preview window was 1000 times faster for this one function, and the new update does nothing to remedy that.

I wouldn't try it - safer to boot up from another system drive and install iTunes 11 there.

hyperexodus wrote

I'm wondering if I wanted to test iTunes 11.0.3 using another user account on the same machine, does that overwrite the iTunes 10.7 on my administrator account?

Eddie Strauss wrote:

Not true. Select all the songs you want to add artwork to. Get Info. Drag artwork from your desktop to the Artwork window. When you click OK artwork will be added to each track in turn.

Before you say you can't add additional artwork, you can. For each track that you want to add additional things like notes or alternate covers, select the track. Get Info and go to the last tab Artwork. You can deposit a collection of files in there.

I realize there are no arrows in the main view to switch around. But you can determine which file shows in the individual track by the order it is in. You can click and drag the files around and change that.

I've always used Get Info because it embeds the artwork in the file whereas dragging to the preview does not. If the artwork is not embeded and you copy the file, the artwork doesn't go. I also don't use multiple artwork so that's not an issue for me. However, if I did, your solution is horrible for anything other than a single track. If I wanted to add multiple artwork to every track on an album, doing it one track at a time would be horrible for a single disc album with 10-12 tracks. Impossible for multi disc albums with 20-30 plus tracks.

I also doubt being able to force display of the album art in song view is enough for me to upgrade. I use the art preview to see if a single track has the wrong art. I'm sure the art in song view is one image for the entire album like in Album List view in 10.7. Great, but not sufficient for me to upgrade. Compared to scrolling with the down arrow, Get Info is just too slow.

To tell the truth, I can't imagine any reason I'll ever ugrade iTunes. 10.7 works fine for me. I have an iPod Classic. I doubt if anything will change with it that will force me to upgrade.

Patience is a virtue. I stuck with 11 in hopes they would bring back the art in list view and there it is in the latest update!

Though it's a bit hidden, because I wish you could just use key commands to restore the list view with album art, it's a step in the right direction.

Steve Compton wrote:

I've always used Get Info because it embeds the artwork in the file whereas dragging to the preview does not. If the artwork is not embeded and you copy the file, the artwork doesn't go.

I just tried it - had a City and Color song with no artwork. Found the artwork in Google Images, dragged it to the album art preview in iTunes 10.7. Dragged the song to my desktop, opened it with VLC player, and the new artwork was indeed embedded.

This is quite a relief since the preview window is how I populate a lot of my music with artwork, and in the next couple of years will very likely be migrating my entire library (and artwork) to something other than iTunes.

Try it Steve. As far as I can tell, whether you use "Get Info" or just drag and drop into Preview - the artwork gets embedded either way.

Thanks for your advice. I don't have another Mac to testrun 11.0.3 so I'll be holding out for a while longer.