Why does iTunes rarely find album artwork?

Kurt,

Unlike CD track names, which iTunes retrieves from the third party Gracenote, album art searches go to the iTunes Store. Generally it will only find the art if the artist and album name are identical to what the Store has, meaning every single character, punctuation, and space.

So you can see why being a "bonafide classic CD" doesn't necessarily help.

A web search for the image is always the best backup (if not the first choice).

My iTunes library is also mostly classical music, and I turned off the "get album artwork" on iTunes for this same reason. I'll find the cover art myself while the disc is being copied. It's just part of the process for me, similarly I will always adjust the track names to follow the formatting I prefer.

Kurt's explanation sounds right. As well, consider that there are some classical CDs that have been reissued numerous times, so it would anyway be difficult for an automatic cover art function to select the right one.

Kurt Triffet wrote:

Thanks, and another obstacle is choosing the "correct" name for the album when you insert a CD. Many have multiple title choices, and finding the right ones that may correspond to album art that Apple has is always a crapshoot.

Agree, and there is no guarantee that any of the Gracenote choices will match to the iTunes Store.

BTW, does anyone know the optimum smallest pixel size for a CD cover to load into "Album Info"? I usually seek out the largest I can find (above 600x600)

Kurt, That is subjective to your own preferences. I can tell you that many album covers that looked acceptable on my old monitor appear lacking on my new better screen. It is probably a little more future-proof to get fairly high resolution art.

I agree - I also generally select the best quality / largest size album artwork when I'm loading in a new CD.

Here are the steps I follow to find album artwork:

- go to Google Images (images.google.com)

- search for the album title (example: Beethoven Symphonies Karajan)

- select the image that matches my specific CD

- click on 'Search by image'

- the next page should give the option to 'Find other sizes of this image'. I generally select 'All sizes'

- the result will generally be a page with a large number of matches for that particular CD image, in some case a very large number

- I'll make my selection from those that are now shown

This probably seems like a lot of work, but it's actually quite fast and when you're familiar with this process it is very easy to find good quality CD artwork for just about any CD.

In the rare cases when I have difficulty locating a good quality image, I may go to Amazon or something similar, find the CD there and then copy the image. You can then use Google Images to 'search by image' and it will look for matches to the image you provide.

Phil - Good tips on managing artwork, thanks.