Finding Album Cover Art

You can often find suitable artwork on the various Amazon sites. Locate the album, save the picture to your desktop and drag it to the iTunes artwork pane. Another way would be to locate artwork using Google image search and put the artist or album name and save the picture you find there in the same way. There are also some programs like this one: Corripio Artwork Finder

I think that if you have the newest version of iTunes, under the ADVANCED header you have a place where you can click on get album artwork; and itunes does the rest.

I had to do it a couple of times but it seemed to work for most of my old ripped cd's.

you can also try this link...found it a while back..kind of a pain..but works

http://art4itunes.com/getart/uploadtracks.php

hope this helps

I ran into the same thing too. The easy way to get album art is with a widget published by Widget-foundry.com and that widget is also on the Apple site under the category of music related widgets.

The widget looks at Amazon first then it looks at Google image search using the album title as the search term. It will pull in the selected art automaticly for you, and it works just fine.

When all else fails, I go to the record labels web site and pull down a copy of the album art from their web site. The final resort (I only had to do this once) was to scan the cover and pull the file in that way. Its not practical or very time effficient, but it works. I get kind of determined about things and will spend hours chewing on some little thing till I get it.

Aside from using "the art" which came from "the album" on a few occasions I have simpy used some nice little photograph that I happen to like.

So there you have it, plans a, b, c and so on. Hope this helps.

Eric,

"I find it a little hard to believe everyone in this sort of situation is sitting down scanning old CD covers."

I've actually done just that for a few CDs whose covers I couldn't find anywhere online!

Matt

I also just use Amazon (.com, .ca, .co.uk) to find the art. The problem is that art is often larger then I need (6+ inches square at 72ppi) and sometimes has varying amounts of white border around the art, so I drag to the desktop and reduce or crop in Photoshop, then drag to the artwork box in iTunes.

This way I can guarantee that all artwork is big enough to not be pixelated even in iTunes or on my iPod, but small enough to not take up too much space when embedded. It also guarantees the correct album art, a decent image (not crooked, poor colour/contrast), and that it is without borders.

And is still far far quicker then scanning.

The iTunes store has without a doubt the best quality album artwork, generally it is 600x600 pixels and a good quality blemish free scan with no white borders.

As a comparison, WMP only gives you 200x200 pixels.

As mentioned Amazon is a good source of artwork and nearly all are 500x500 pixels, however many have a very annoying white border around them.

I now use Walmart as my second choice as it also has 500x500 images but unlike Amazon most do not have white borders.

A final method of last resort is to use Google Images. You can nearly always find the right artwork, the time consuming aspect is finding one of the desired size.