Artwork - Why Can't I get It?

The iTunes store can only supply artwork for albums in the store, and the names must be identical.

So the first thing to check is if the items are in the store, the Beatles won't be.

However there is a way round this, you can get art from other places such as Amazon.

If you select all the tracks in an album in Get Info, you can past an item of artwork into all of them in one go. Doing it takes up more space in your music files.

Was that a rhetorical question? 🙂

I'm just an iTunes user like yourself, you could use the feedback form to suggest an improvement in the support for artwork:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

I've just purchased an iPod Video and imported all my
CD's but cannot get the artwork for many of the
albums. The list includes The Beatles, The Rolling
Stones, T.Rex and many others.

Can someone tell me why, please? I've enabled
'Automatically download missing artwork' option in
Options, but that hasn't helped.

Firstly the relevant album/track actually has to be on the iTunes store. As everyone and his dog should know, the Beatles are famously not on the iTunes store. I do not know about the other wrinkly rockers you list.

The other issue, is that not only do you have to have the 'Automatically download missing artwork' option turned on, you must also have a valid iTunes store account which iTunes must be logged in to.

Note: you will not be charged for downloading artwork.

Finally, if your artist/track names are incorrect they will not match and find the artwork on the iTunes store.

Ah. Why is it that Windoze Media Player can download
the artwork files? I can't buy the albums from
there, either!

Microsoft uses a different service that they don't own for the vast majority of their artwork retrieval (by a different service, that would be outside of their music store)

Ah, didn't know about the Beatles but I do know. 🙂

I still have problems though. Case in point: Scarlet's Walk by Tori Amos which is on iTunes. Track names and number of tracks are the same as are the album and artist names. There are minor differences in track length (probably since I imported it from a CD or due to differences between US/European versions). Still I can't get the album art though I can see it on iTunes.

I have the "automatically download missing option" switched on but nothing happens.

Any ideas why this is?

Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi Windows XP Pro

All I can say is that all my CDS were ripped ourside iTunes and the track information came from elswhere, but I still managed to get all the artwork available in the iTunes store by carefully editing the artist and album name so they were identical and using the get artwork option on the advanced menu.

The "Automatically Download Missing Artwork" option only works when items are first added to your iTunes library (or the first time it's run). Try manually selecting one of the songs on the album and then using the RightClick->Get Album Artwork option.

I have the same album, ripped from CD, in my library, and I was able to get the album art for it.

If you want to make sure that a song/album will be able to grab the correct album art, you should try clicking the arrow button next to the song in your library (if you don't have the arrows, you can turn them on checking the "Show links to the iTunes Store" box under general preferences.) Clicking the arrow will automatically start a search of the iTunes Store using the song name, album, and artist. If you click on that link and the iTunes Store automatically finds the proper song in the proper album, then it should get the proper album art. If it doesn't pull up the proper album (and the album is on the iTunes Store), you might need to edit the song/album/artist name to make sure they are exactly the same as on the iTunes Store.

There are minor differences in track length (probably since I imported it from a CD or due to differences between US/European versions).

Thats probably why the art isn't being downloaded, iTunes is most likely seeing it as a different album...

Thanks. Shame that such a (minor) difference seems to put such obstacles in my way.

I tried clicking the arrows and they link to the correct album and song but I'm not having the same luck as you with the right click -> get album art work.

Are your tracks the exact same length as on iTunes?

Paul I am not sure this is true, I just conned iTunes into supplying artwork from an album it did have to an album in my library that it did not have by the same artist by editing the album name.

One thing you might try is to copy and past the artist name and album name from the iTunes store into your album so you know they are identical. I am not sure if it is fooled by things like spaces and apostrophes.

I just double-checked, and the track lengths on my copy of Scarlet's Walk are slightly different than the version included on the iTunes Store. Now, it only takes one track to get the artwork for the entire album, so it might be worth it to try getting the album art using each different song. At least one of them should work.

Just tried that and unfortunately nothing happened.

On a side note: I looked through the info for the different tracks and there's a slight difference between my library and iTunes. In iTunes the tracks are all labelled "disc number 1 of 1" and mine were "1/2" for some reason. I changed it to 1/1 but still no luck. Thanks for all the suggestions though. 🙂

I just checked a couple of other albums. There are the same, minor differences in track length but with those albums the art appeared automatically so I think it must be something else I'm not aware of.