Album Artwork in Finder

Maybe I'm old fashioned by why do you need artwork in a car if your eyes are supposed to be on the road at all times?

What format are the files? WAV won't hold artwork.

I believe artwork can be present in various formats, jpg, png. Perhaps one format is not supported (and I have no idea how to tell which one is present)? I know when I used one of Dougscripts to copy artwork from one file to another it perceptably decreased the quality and changed brightness of the image so it probably underwent some transformation.

Here's why you see what you do.

When you "get artwork" through the iTunes store... You get a file that's stored in your Album artwork folder, and iTunes writes a "reference" to that file, so that when you play the song in iTunes, the artwork shows. One or maybe two tracks will actually get the artwork "embedded" so it also appears in Finder.

Problem is... when you put tracks on a USB drive and plug it into your car stereo, there's no folder for the track to call on to get the artwork, because it's on your computer.

Solution:

"Embed" the artwork into EVERY track so no matter where you play it, the artwork is actually part of the metadata of the file itself.

If you have a really big library, I suggest you buy MPFreaker. http://www.lairware.com/mpfreaker/

It can add (embed) artwork to about 50 tracks at a time. Granted it'll take a while with a library of 40,000 tracks like mine, but your other option is to select an album at a time in iTunes and "Get Info" to paste it yourself.

I don't know if Finder is using embedded artwork or yet some other format such as thumbnails, so I don't know how definitive it is for artwork displaying in a player. iTunes itself isn't using embedded artwork. iTunes makes its own reference collection of artwork, though embedded artwork may be the source of the art iTunes uses when first imported.