Album Artwork for Itunes 11

'studyplenty' explains the problem very well, and I can confirm that 'Timbuktu's solution does seem to work - thank you Sir!

(although as this is an "iTunes for Windows" forum section, I guess you should be mentioning "Ctrl-C" and "Ctrl-V" for the copy and paste commands 😉)

But what a complete and utter mess Apple have made of iTunes now. It was hard enough when they stopped letting you click and drag artwork from a website, but now it's ridiculous

I will have to do this for every album I import, just so the album art gets properly embedded and I can see it on other devices.

Does anyone know if there was ANY good reason for crippling the program like this, or was it just a ****-up on Apple's part?

Between iTunes and Firefox, I seem to spend half my life trying to get things BACK to how I liked them, battling against programmers who seem to have nothing better to do than to break things that worked fine previously.

Not really sure what the problem is ... iTunes allows you to associate artwork with albums in two ways:

1. Using the Get Artwork right-click option - this will retrieve an image from the iTunes Store if that album is sold through that channel (obviously artist/name must match)
2. Right-click > Get Info on the album, either double-click on the artwork box and select a suitable image file (scanned, retrieved from the 'net, ...), or copy the artwork from another source such as a website and right-click > paste on the artwork box.

What's the issue? Yes, iTunes behavior in these two cases is slightly different - (1) puts images into Album Artwork\Downloads whereas (2) in general embeds images in each file comprising the album - but in most cases the difference is transparent to the user. An earlier poster referred to sharing music with a friend (illegal, BTW) and bemoaning that album artwork isn't embedded is you use option (1). If you want all artwork to be embedded you can simply follow option (2) in all cases ... if necessary, you can:

• Use Get Artwork (option 1) to retrieve artwork from the iTunes store
• Select one track of the album, right-click > Get Info > Artwork tab
• Right-click on the image, select Copy
• Select the whole album, right-click > Clear Downloaded Artwork
• Right-click > Get Info, right-click on the Artwork box > Paste

This should embed the artwork in individual tracks.

The problems are mainly to do with PORTABILITY. In today;'s world, we access our own music collection on all sorts of platforms, in all sorts of ways. One day I might be playing it via network streaming to my main hi-fi, another day sending via bluetooth from my phone to a BT speaker, another day via bluetooth to my car radio from my satnav.

And to get album art to show up on all those devices correctly is becoming a BIG headache. Latest versions of iTunes make it worse, not better.

1. Using the Get Artwork right-click option.... This is a completely proprietary system, and stores the album artwork in a separate folder. This is of no use to ANY other system. No other program will look for art in that place, and the folder will not tend to be copied across to anything else anyway.

1b. After using the Get Artwork option, iTunes now LOOKS like it has embedded the artwork (the "get info" panels LOOK like a standard ID3 tag editor) but it hasn't. You have to find out by trial and error (or by searching forums such as this one).

There is now no way at all in iTunes to see if the artwork is actually embedded or not.

2b. If I remember correctly, we used to be able to simply drag artwork from a webpage straight into iTunes. That no longer works and you have to save a local copy of the file and THEN drag it in. More steps to take every time.

2c Thank you for the instructions, but we had already been given that method by "Timbuktu" above.

2d Yes it works, but what a time-consuming business it is, when you have to remember to do it for every single album you import.

And while we're here, don't get me started on how iTunes keeps splitting albums up into multiple folders just because there happens to be a couple of contributing artists on a couple of tracks. If they used the "album artist" tag for file management instead, everything would be a whole lot neater.

Use the script EmbedFolderArt to ensure that artwork is embedded into tracks. For tracks that currently have store downloaded art a local copy will be saved in the album folder as part of the process. Should there be art stored there already the largest (implies better quality) image will be embedded.

iTunes does recognize Album Artist, though you can force it not to "Group by Album Artist" if you choose (affects visual display, but not file storage rules). The CDDB database that iTunes draws on when you insert a CD does not, but is easy enough to complete the information before ripping. See also Grouping tracks into albums.

tt2

Many thanks for that link, some useful scripts there!

Especially the one you mention and also the Artist --> Album Artist one too - I've been doing that manually every time.

Hmm... I just tried the "embed" script and I just get a Vbasic runtime error "ActiveX component can't create object: "WIA.ImageFile"

Not doing very well tonight.

I'm currently trying everything I can think of to get one particular album to show art on an Android phone and it just refuses to. Other albums ripped in just the same way display fine and I just cannot see where the difference lies.

You're welcome. 🙂

It is usually a matter of moments to set Album Artist for all tracks of a selected album. I do it for consistency but it only needs to be done when there are some tracks with guest/featured artists, or it is a compilation, in which case that script doesn't do what is really required. When I'm rationalising a library I use the column browser and step through the albums one at a time. If I see an inconsistency I press CTRL-A, CTRL-I to select, the tracks, add the Album Artist or apply some other album wide fIxes like getting rid of (Deluxe Version), click OK, then move on to the next album. The process is really quite quick. Once the problem albums have been fixed a smart playlist with Playlist is Music and Album Artist is <Blank> will bring up all the tracks that would benefit from automatic updating with the CopyArtistToAlbumArtist script.

tt2

This method has always worked. I have used it many times when the iTunes store didn't have the artwork for the album. But this method you describe is not at all the issue in these questions. The issue is that the iTunes store used to provide the album artwork by clicking on "Get album artwork", but this doesn't work anymore. I imagine that it will work with songs bought at the iTunes store, but it doesn't work with CDs that you own and load into iTunes.

The Get Album Artwork functions as it (in my recollection) always has. If the album is available in the Store, based on a match of artist and album title, then artwork will be retrieved, Obviously there are some cases where this won't work - mainly for older or obscure releases that may not be available from the Store. There are also the cases where the metadata retrieved from Gracenote as part of iTunes' CD import process doesn't match that for the same release in the Store, or the user has entered metadata that is sufficiently different from that used by the Store to make matching impossible. There are even cases where Get Album Artwork retrieves the wrong artwork, where an artist has two very similarly-named releases, or the artwork from the Store may not be the same as that of physical CD (e.g., where US and UK releases have different covers).

However, is definitely incorrect to say "this doesn't work anymore".