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album artwork can't be found by iTunes

I've recently digitised my CD collection - it took months to do! But iTunes cannot find the artwork for the majority of the albums. I sign in to iTunes, go to 'get album artwork' and it goes quiet for a couple of minutes then tells me 'Could not get artwork for some albums'. If I try to do it one at a time by right clicking the missing artwork symbol and choosing 'get artwork' - nothing happens. ITunes found the track names for the albums so it can't be that the album isn't recognised. I'm using a 13 inch macbook pro running Yosemite 10.10.5 and iTunes version 12. Please help!

Chris

Macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Sep 29, 2016 6:17 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 30, 2016 5:17 AM

Hi Chris,


I've got a collection of older, sometimes obscure, often small-label music, and I encounter this situation all the time. What it generally means, I think, is that the album is recognized by the internet database where iTunes tries to look it up (CDDB, I think — a separate entity from Apple), but is not sold in the iTunes Store. For these albums, there's no artwork for iTunes to download.


Now and then I get in the right sort of mood — more or less the same one in which I'd once sit on the floor for an hour or two, trying to organize my LPs — and go through the process of adding album art manually. You can almost always find it somewhere online and paste it into Get Info / Artwork for the albums involved.


Sorry I've got nothing more magical to suggest!


Cheers

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 30, 2016 5:17 AM in response to chriscane

Hi Chris,


I've got a collection of older, sometimes obscure, often small-label music, and I encounter this situation all the time. What it generally means, I think, is that the album is recognized by the internet database where iTunes tries to look it up (CDDB, I think — a separate entity from Apple), but is not sold in the iTunes Store. For these albums, there's no artwork for iTunes to download.


Now and then I get in the right sort of mood — more or less the same one in which I'd once sit on the floor for an hour or two, trying to organize my LPs — and go through the process of adding album art manually. You can almost always find it somewhere online and paste it into Get Info / Artwork for the albums involved.


Sorry I've got nothing more magical to suggest!


Cheers

Sep 30, 2016 5:23 AM in response to chriscane

Not all album artwork is available from the online resource, which is different from the online database of album and track names. For missing album artwork, you can add them manually, by finding artwork online. For example, you can drag artwork image from a web page (like album listing on Amazon) to your Mac's Desktop, to download image file. Then, select the album in iTunes, right-click it, and Get Info. When you Get Info on an album, you're opening a multi-item Info window for all songs on album. Go to Info window Artwork tab. Drag artwork image file from Desktop to artwork field on Info window.

album artwork can't be found by iTunes

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