album art question

@Scott: I do not suggest that you do the whole Library, but only those that are missing album artwork. You do NOT have to make a "smart album" because when you have selected the songs, you already have the selection.

I have the album artwork IN THE FILE.

What I am sure of is that you have to select all the songs in one album - and not leave one or more out - and when you have the hundreds of songs selected, do "get info" and then check the artwork field, click OK: now none of the songs have any artwork any more.

Then with the songs still selected do the "get album artwork" thing.

Now you have the artwork and after syncing with iPad the artwork is alo in the iPad. When in Finder you copy the songs from the /Music/iTunes/iTunesMusic to another disk or another computer they still display the artwork.

The crux is that you must arrange that no song in the selection has ny artwork in it before you do the get artwork thing.

I am not interested about you can or cannot find it in iTunes, or older versions. I use ML latest and iTunes latest. I did not have done this with older versions.

BTW: I am absolutely a fan of iTunes 11: it is even better than iTunes 10. I don't mind when iTunes does not have coverflow anymore (beautiful, but it does not do anything for you), but having more functions available is what counts. iTunes11 is absolutely a super high-end app.

Lex, I'm concluding that you are not reading all the posts in this thread. Scott already ran "get album artwork" and now does NOT know which ones where assigned downloaded album art - both correct and incorrect - because the SMART playlist no longer shows them, only the ones where no artwork was found. You likely have discovered that you can identify which tracks have downloaded artwork as it will be displayed when you right click on them. My suggestion to Scott was to simply erase all downloaded artwork as it will preserve the artwork he had added manually which is pretty much most of his library, and it will remove the artwork Apple fetched for him. Now he can start over and do it your way.

I figured out why you strongly believe iTunes does embed the artwork. I did clear all artwork from a couple albums, double-checked that it was all erased, and used "get album artwork" to fetch the images. In Mountain Lion, the file seems to have the artwork embedded as it will show up when you select "get info" on the actual file. Also, it will now be displayed on all your iDevices when you manually transfer the songs which is new and awesome.

Nevertheless, it is not embedded. If you have VLC on your system, right click the mp3 file and open it with VLC. Select metadata info and there is NO artwork showing. If this is still not convincing to you, copy two mp3s, one with manually added/embedded artwork, the other one with fetched by Apple artwork (selecting all the tracks in an album), and transfer it to another computer and import it into iTunes or whatever music player. Then you will see that only one with the manually added artwork has it truly embedded.

My point: Apple seems to have improved their artwork management so it is shown almost system-wide and on all devices which is great. But if you want to transfer your music files to another system the artwork is not preserved.

As for me, I am very glad that you pointed out that Apple-fetched artwork is now truly usable and I will be using it when adding new music to my library as it is by far the easiest and quickest way to get it.

Take care.

I did following:

I copied a MP3-file (that I was sure has the "get Artwork procedure") from my iPad to an external disk (with Diskaid), I copied the same file from the iTunes folder to another external disk with Finder, I closed iTunes, disconnected the external disks, reconnected, opened them with VLC, and you know what? you are right !!

Thank you for the lesson; iTunes "reach" is incredible, but indeed the artwork is not imbedded in the file when iTunes gets the artwork. I did not help in solving Scott's problem.

happy new year.

Lex, you did help by pointing out that artwork management in iTunes is now usable in Mountain Lion for stubborn people like me who are still manually managing iPods and artwork, and it will save me time from now on as fetching artwork will just be done automatically, no more scripts and no more drag and drop and paste. And Scott has now all the info he needs to decide whether he wants to pursue his quest to embedded artwork.

Happy New Year.