Why would there be problems, it won't overweight your song files your original art because they are obviously trying to save resources to allow it to work on overloaded PC's.

Personally I would like to spend my "spare" resources on inserting the cover-art in each song and ask me when it wants to replace, keep both, or original.

But most importantly is the fact that most of us nerds that frequent itunes have a have different preferences.

Have you been able to confirm that iTunes isn't writing the artwork into the audio file? It occured to me that the Artwork folder you found may be for Coverflow. I'm sure coverlow needs some kind of cache to whip through those albums so fast.

Good question Paul. Just tested -- copied a file for which iTunes had downloaded artwork today to another Mac, and it did not have artwork.

You're probably right about Coverflow needing the speed, but it's definitely still screwing us on portability.

I didn't have the chance to make more accurate tests, but after running the "get all artwork" procedure on two different computer i have the feeling that i ended up with less artwork that i used to have, at least in the (completely useless) coverflow view.

I'm starting to wonder that:
a) itunes looks for covers just in your national itunes store, which means that if you're living in a technologically 3rd-world country like italy your chances of finding artwork for foreign albums are quite dim
b) itunes overwrite your artwork if it's unable to find the album in the itunes store

i'll do some more testing as soon as i have some time to spend on it.

regards
Marcello

Marcello -

itunes overwrite your artwork if it's unable to find the album in the itunes store

I think that's definitely true. However, since there's both ID3-stored artwork and the new folder hierarchy, I wonder if you could get your old artwork back by removing all or certain folders from the "Album Artwork" folder. If you try this, please let us know here whether it worked.

'For now, I'm only downloading album artwork selectively, and only for albums for which I don't already have cover art'

Is there a way of sorting on 'no cover art'? Can't see it in smart playlists.

Doesn't the fact that it's storing the artwork somewhere other than in the audio files suggest a solution to this:

When matches are found, existing cover art you've spent years gathering may be replaced with art Apple thinks you should have, "including that from Music Store previous purchases." Original covers may be replaced with covers from compilations.

If it overwrites something you want to keep presumably you can just trash the downloaded cover art to restore the original.

Well,
hmm, in fact iTunes gets ONLY artworks that are MISSING (and it says so in the dialog box asking you whether you want to automatically DL artworks, as well as in the iTunes prefs).
Also, Artworks are indeed stored locally as .itc files, and they DO NOT overwrite artworks that might have been added to the mp3 file itself. BUT if a file has an "embedded" artwork and iTune has found a Coverflow artwork on the iTMS, then Coverflow will show the iTMS artwork for the ALBUM... remember, coverflow works for ALBUMS, not single tracks...
So, it's a good/bad balance... also, how long before someone releases a small app to copy coverflow artworks into the mp3 ressources?

Hey..... if you Get Info of all the tracks in an album, you can copy & paste its artwork in a new Artwork box. Then every track will get the artwork embedded inside its .mp3 file. You can just copy and paste the artwork downloaded by iTunes 7 and "re-paste" it this way to use the artwork provided by Apple and insert it inside the files (thus cross-platform). You can check this using utilities like MPFreaker which lets you see which songs have artwork embedded. It works for me.

I'm pretty sure those are simply cache files used when you browse with the Cover Flow feature, not art that is added to music files. Check a music file's size before and after adding art using iTunes.

I ran a script that checks for art work on itunes 7, it seems that iTunes looks for the Data in 3 places.
The file itself, the local folder and the Downloaded folder in the iTunes Artwork folder.

The caching is indeed part of cover flow which is how the original CoverFlow worked.

iTunes does not embed the artwork into the file unless you past or put it into the artwork info box manually.

Posting again, since when I first posted I hadn't seen the other comments...

Scot says he copied a file to another Mac, and it was sans artwork; I just tried with a few files for which I got art via iTunes, and they _do_ have art on the other Mac... But I know Scot's a smart guy, so I looked a bit more closely.

iTunes is indeed downloading the art when the files are added; if you have the download artwork pref checked, this will happen (I saw the network activity once the files were copied to iTunes). If not, which is probably Scot's case, then the art won't be downloaded.

Which raises an interesting question - is it better to have the art in the files, taking up space in each file, or simply have a single .itc file for all the songs in an album? This makes no difference on the iPod, which already "optimizes" artwork by only copying the art once for multiple occurences, but will it make a big difference on a computer?

I guess that, in any case, those files are being created either from the existing artwork or from artwork that's downloaded for Cover Flow to work, so you'll have them no matter what. Now, it might actually be worthwhile to try and remove art from files and save a few GB (if you have a lot of music) then have iTunes replace the art, if it's available.

I'm not sure about what I'm going to say, but I don't think iTune removed any album arts from any song files. This new external-album-art feature suppliments rather than replaces the old internal-album-art method. So, you can continue to add album arts into all your songs. However, with this new feature, if there is a song that has no album art in it, then iTune will look for an external album art coming from the same album.

I should have said, The way I double checked this was to quit iTunes and trash the cache artwork .itc files.
iTunes did not find any artwork for files that it downloaded the art work for.
It did find artwork for one I had Pasted the artwork into the info window. And I suspect any music purchased from apple will have the artwork embedded at source.

While I have experienced a lot of weirdness with the Get Album Art feature in iTunes, I have yet to see it overwrite any existing cover art I had, and I have run it many times.

I've tried manually adding art, and as best as I can tell, it is *not* being added directly into the mp3 files.

I wonder what this means for moving tracks from one library to another. I've long used two libraries, one at home which is my main library and one on my laptop, which is my portable/new stuff library. If I import tracks from one to another, will it bring the album art with it or will it drop out? I'm not home to test right now, or I would.

I definitely want artwork stored in the music files, because I archive them to DVD in case of disaster. (iTunes 7 makes this easier, by the way.) I checked some Apple Lossless files to see if manual methods of adding artwork (dropping on the artwork box; dropping or pasting into track info) resulted in changes to song files. I'm happy to report that, yes, they do: I dropped a 200k JPEG (Hmm. Maybe I should have re-compressed that.) onto a 1.9MB track, and -- yes -- its size increased to 2.1MB. Deleting the artwork cut its size back down again. So I'm happy.

I thought that perhaps the increase in speed could be due to a rearranged file layout, with the containers for tags at the end rather than the beginning -- this would mean the tags could be rewritten without having to copy the audio data. But no: checking the atoms (thanks, Perl and Audio::M4P::QuickTime) shows that this isn't the case. Besides, it'd be a stupid idea for stuff delivered as streams. Maybe QuickTime just got a whole lot quicker at rewriting files.

I can't speak to artwork that is automatically downloaded by iTunes, but for artwork that is manually pasted into the info box, iTunes 7 is most definitely still writing the artwork into the song file, just like it always did.

I did a series of tests this morning... adding and deleting artwork manually in iTunes 7, and then moving the songs to a computer still running iTunes 6. All the songs showed up exactly how they should, either with or without artwork, depending on if I added or deleted.

My experience is that iTunes does NOT get artwork from the country store of your account and instead appears to only be using the US store.

I have just upgraded to iTunes 7 and tested the new Get Album Artwork command. I have an iTunes store account on the UK iTMS store. The album I used for testing is ¨The Greatest Hits - Why Try Harder?¨ by Fatboy Slim [UK edition]. Despite the fact that the UK iTMS store shows the correct artwork (for the UK edition of the album) and despite the fact that the link from the album in my iTunes library goes to that correct album on the UK iTMS store and despite the fact my login is set to use the UK store, the Get Album Artwork command actually downloaded the US edition artwork and not the UK edition.

The URL for the correct UK edition is http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=155936130&s=143444

The URL for the INCORRECT US edition is http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=158138249&s=143441

Either it should download the correct artwork or it should let a user choose if there is more than one possibility.

Unfortunately this looks like yet another example of Americans forgetting the rest of the world exists.

Fortunately I had already laboriously searched for and manually applied correct UK artwork to all my other albums and iTunes correctly left them alone rather than replacing them with more incorrect US versions.

Many other similar utilities like Corripio let you specify which country to use for searching for Artwork, you would think Apple would do the same and automatically use the country of your iTMS account first (and others countries second if no result is found in your country store).

So it's confirmed. Using the Get Info panel to add artwork still results in the art being added to the audio file as it always did, while using the Get Album Artwork command results in the artwork only being added externally, to "Album Art" folder. That's good to know, but look - it took us group of geeks a bunch of experimenting around to figure that out. No way in the world would the average person ever be able to see what's going on. Users are going to go happily along, downloading album art for months or years, and then one day they're going to move a bunch of tracks to another machine, or switch to Ubuntu, or whatever, and find that all of that painstakingly gathered artwork is nowhere to be found. Storing the metadata *only* outside of the files creates an inherently fragile situation.

And the inconsistency of behavior between the Info panel and the Get Album Art command is bizarre/confusing.

The added bummer is that for those of us who want to store metadata like album art inside the files, we just lost access to this otherwise very cool new feature in iTunes. Until iTunes gives us the option to store it inside of files (as does occur with the Info panel), we can't use the new "Get Album Art" functionality at all. Which is quite a bummer.

What's up with this, Apple?

Artwork files are named using the Persistent Library ID and the track's ID from the XML file. This is how iTunes keeps track of artwork for different libraries

This folder based approach was also how the original CoverFlow application did things.

Scott, we can use the new feature, but we have to be a little tricky about it. I did another little test, and this works:

1. Allow iTunes to download the artwork for you.
2. Open the info box for that song and copy the artwork.
3. Delete the artwork
4. Re-paste the artwork

Doing this results in the artwork being embeded. It's a hassle, but at least we can use the feature.

Paul, thanks for the tip. Dang, that *is* convoluted! Hardly a solution...

Ya, i Know. I'm hoping Apple is considering this a bug, and will maybe fix it in 7.01 to embed all artwork. But, until then, we can at least use the download feature.

LOL - I just selected all songs in George Harrison's "All Things Must Pass." The cover art I got is for "The Essential George Gershwin." Nice chance to use the "Clear Downloaded Artwork" option (which works as advertised).

Does anybody know, if there is a way to view those *.itc-Files with an external Image-Viewer (Mac or Windows)? Are those Files normal images like JPGs or PNGs?

Is it just me or there's a sorting bug with the Album View?

I have 2 albums with the same name :
Led Zeppelin - III
Sebadoh - III

If I browse by Album View and sort by Album (which is the only way if you have a few compilations) the 2 aforementioned albums are split by each other according to the track number.

Since I don't have the full Led Zep album, it splits only 3 times but still... Shouldn't it sort automatically by album, then artist?

Here's a screenshot of the problem.

> Alex Lamm
GraphicConverter is able to get the JPEG part of the .itc file. Just drag the file on GraphicConverter's icon and it should ask you if you want to display the image part.

@El Rocco: I noticed the same problem. I think it is triggered by the fact that iTunes now looks at the "Album Artist" tag for sorting. If you copy the artist fields these albums to the "Album Artist" fields, you should be all set...

ok - good to find this thread here - I was wondering this myself when I realized the date stamps of the files I fetched album art for remained the same.

What I want to know is if anyone has figured out what format these .itc files are in? tried renaming the file to see if it was JPEG but no luck. I want to see what art got replaced and did not and be good to see what got downloaded.

Has anyone figured out if it is "safe" to delete the Album Art directory - it is just a cache?

Chinaraut - It's not just a cache. It's the set of all the album art downloaded through iTunes "Get Cover Art" feature. It does NOT include art that's already embedded in your MP3 files - stuff you've added manually in the past. Deleting that folder would be the equivalent of selecting all songs in iTunes, then right-clicking and selecting "Clear Downloaded Cover Art." You'd lose all externally stored art, but keep all art already stored inside MP3 files.

This post - and all comments - are very interesting.
I want to tell you, what happend to me. I tried to download Albom Art cover, and nothing happens. I searched to iT(M)S manuelly and they definitly sell the songs. So I start catching cover art manuelly (or using a dashboard widget, which look at amazon). I stored the cover art in the songs directly and I got the process bar when I stort the same cover to a lot of songs.
When I browse cover flow, it takes a some time for iTunes to show the cover art to that albums. First I see the graw empty cover, then the cover shows up. I if browser away, the found cover gets lost and I have to wait to again, when I come back.
What we all need is a command that syncs ID3-Tags and Art-Folder. Listen up, cocoa developers.

GraphicConverter is able to get the JPEG part of the .itc file. Just drag the file on GraphicConverter's icon and it should ask you if you want to display the image part.
GC 5.9.1 dumps.itc file data forks in a dialog when I try opening them. Is there some preference to override that (I couldn't find one)?

OK - well here's my thing. I originally had album covers on some of my cd's and then now that I have this download album cover it's in a much clearer and nicer format. Is there a way to delete this? I've even deleted the files/rebooted/etc where the pics were at and somehow I tunes still keeps finding them. How can I get rid of them so that Itunes can find it's own?

I figured out how to get artwork that previously would not sync with the ipod to finnaly show. It is a lengthy and tedious process but for someone like me with only 100 songs that dont show artwork, this is useful. go into you itunes 7 library and for each song that will not show artwork on you ipod:
1. right click the song
2. click get info
3. change anything in any of the 5 tabs (i like changing the track number for the songs that are just singles)
4. then sync your ipod and the artwork will show

Hope this has been helpful and Apple, please work out these kinks so your deticated users will not have to suffer through this tedious process.

I have just done some experiments with adding and removing artwork manually while checking the file size.
The album was 103MB with no artwork.
Manually adding album art using the Get Info box
The album was 106.5MB
Deleting the album art by clearing the Get Info box
The album was 106.6MB
Re-adding the album art in the Get Info box
The album was 111.2MB

Checking the artwork tags on individual tracks shows only one copy of the album art ...

People seem to be forgetting that while some love embedded album art, other people don't. Personally, it kills me to have an mp3 fattened with attached album art. It makes my whole library bigger, and album art really does little for me. So, while I agree that Apple should make embedding an option, I don't believe it should be the standard, otherwise there will be another article bashing Apple for taking away the user's right to choose.

Ok, so I'm one who DOES NOT want the album art embedded in the music files. On a PC & ripping my CD's with Apples losless codec. When itunes gets the correct art, great. if i have to drag/drop my artwork is there any way to make sure it is NOT embedded within the music file, but instead put somewhere in the ...\album artwork directory??

thanks!!

El Steve - If you use the Info panel, it's definitely going to be embedded in the file (that's always been the case - nothing to do with iTunes 7). But if you're using the lossless codec, your files are already huge, and the amount of data consumed by the cover art is is going to be very, very small in comparison.

Disk space is cheap. Metadata disassociated from the files it representes is frangile and non-portable. Why don't you want to store it inside the files?

Scot Hacker - I'm thinking that maybe someday,someway i may want to 'revive' (?) those files back to their original state off the CD & am concerned that the embedded data will preven that.

i.e., lend a cd to a friend, lose one, etc....

of course, if i can do that and have the embedded artwork, no problem - please advise how... ;)

thanks!

El Steve - If you lose the MP3 files and re-rip the CD, you're going to wipe out the artwork regardless where/how it's stored. iTunes 7 will attempt to re-import artwork while a disc is being ripped. As of now, the newly added art will be stored external to the files. Hopefully either Apple or a third party will soon give us a way to have that happen *both* externally and inside ID3v2 data space.

..true enough, however, I'm looking at it from the angle if i lose the original CD.
If the artwork is embedded within the song (and i've used Apples losless codec), can i convert that .m4a file back to .wav to burn a new CD?
this is my first experience with iTuens and i hafta say overall it's pretty cool!

Steve, I'm confused. First you say you want to know what happens if you re-rip the CD to restore the files, then you want to know what happens if you lose the CD...

.wav does not allow storing of artwork inside files. And there's no point converting .m4a to .wav since the audio has already been compressed, so that would be a wasted conversion.

Thanks Jack for your help - that really worked. Another question for everyone out there. Why doesn't the Ipod update the album artwork even though it's updated in Itunes? Is there a way to resync the album artwork? Thanks!

I saw the Album Artwork folder a few days ago but didn't pay much attention to it.
I decided to delete the folder because I had never seen it before and suspected that it had been downloaded from iTS, and the few downloaded album art that I had were deleted...bummer!
I have a few hundred CDs in my library, for which most of them I've manually added the album art to the embedded file by using either Amazon.com or the Widget tool, which as worked great.
This introduction of "automatically get your album art" introduced by iTunes 7 is a great idea, but it needs to have better options. Like some said, to use that external folder to keep the album art or embed it in the file itself. I prefer the latter, since it minimizes errors and compatibility issues, as well as keeps all my CDs' album art the way I want it.
In addition, I also noticed, that the external Album Artwork folder is used to cache the album artwork when viewing in cover mode (3rd option, whatever the name is).
I like the idea, but won't be using it for now. I'll "cheat" the system, and will download the album art from the iTS, then Get Info, go to Artwork, Copy, select the full album, Get Info (again) and paste it there. Only way to make it embedded in the file.
Works for me.

Juan, I mostly agree, but with one caveat: The album art downloaded from iTMS is of much higher quality than the little ones you get from Amazon, etc. Which means that *most* embedded artwork doesn't scale nicely - gets all pixelated. So what I really want is to use the iTMS art for "cached" display, but to also store that larger art inside the files, for portability. For now, I'm using the iTMS art and going on the hope/belief that Apple or someone will make it possible to retroactively copy that art back into the files as well.

Hey,

I stumbled upon your discussion using Google and had some additional info - thought perhaps you guys could help me or perhaps learn from my experiences. I too, am disappointed that the artwork which iTunes "fetched" for me is not showing up on my iPod.

My friend just bought the latest 5G iPod. He has been getting his iPod to sync the ITC album art this way:

1. rip a CD or import the files to iTunes 7
2. get album artwork (have iTunes get ITC)
3. manually sync his iPod

...and the artwork shows up on his iPod.

I have a brand new (but 4G 60GB iPod) and despite all the covers showing in iTunes, none have sync'ed to my iPod.

Can you help me out...or does this info help?

Another follow up...

I just did the following for an album which appears to have iTunes fetched ITC artwork in iTunes but no artwork on my iPod:

1. "Get Info" for all the tracks on an album
2. Changed grouping from blank to "x"
3. Synched iPod

As a result, the iPod files were replaced and the artwork was brought over.

However, clicking on the iPod under devices in iTunes revealed that my "other" file size usage had increased by 3.6MB. That's a pretty big increase for the artwork file. Multiply this by my 700 albums and we're talking 2+ GB being eaten up. That's almost 10% of the music file size.

I could do this all in one batch by selecting my entire library, adding a bogus grouping tag and re-synching (the transfer would take some time) and I would have artwork. However, it would eat a lot of disk space.

Thoughts? Better ideas?

Scott,

I totally agree with your assessment. The size of album art is small relative to the size of the music data. What I'd like to see is a utility that would go through Apple's Album Art folder and insert the album art into the files (most of mine are MP3s). Thus, have it in both places -- the disk space is totally negligible (20k per file which is typically 2-3Meg = 1%). Then, we'd have the best of both worlds -- speed and portability. Disks are gaining in size faster than they are gaining in speed.

Jim

Stumbled upon the conversation through Google. Great info here. I'm new to covers--have never used them to in my library--which is 10,000 songs large. The latest version of iTunes has me intrigued.

One question. When I go to put album covers on my iPod, it optimizes them. This is--I presume so that it doesn't put multiple copies of the cover on the iPod so that space can be saved. Does it also resize the image files because they won't be seen up close on the iPod. If it does do this resizing, where are the resized files stored. I decided that I probably won't look at album art on the iPod and want to erase the resized files from my computer. I'm on Windows BTW. Thanks in advance!

Is there a way to get the SetUp Assistant to not come up every time I start iTunes? It always has the annoying "iTunes can automatically download artwork...". Is there a way to get around this stupid popup?

I presume so that it doesn't put multiple copies of the cover on the iPod so that space can be saved.

That's what the conversation above is about - this is what iTunes 7 does. One piece of artwork applies for the whole album, since it's not storing artwork inside audio files.

Does it also resize the image files because they won't be seen up close on the iPod.

I doubt it - wouldn't be worth the hassle for the tiny bit of savings that would get you.

Vince -

Is there a way to get the SetUp Assistant to not come up every time I start iTunes? It always has the annoying "iTunes can automatically download artwork...

It should only do that the first time. Sounds like it's not remembering your preferences for some reason. Maybe time to blow away the prefs file and let it create a new one.

Next problem is viewing artwork on an iPod. I discovered several wrong artwork allocation on my iPod video-although shown right in iTunes. E.g. "Concert for George": in iTunes all songs have the same artwork. On my iPod first song has artwork from Led Zeppelin, second song has artwork from Yes, third song has artwork from Genesis, the rest of the songs have correct artworks. Or some CDs have complete other artworks then shown in iTunes.

Thomas

For the Windows users out there, I found the following script useful. It creates a playlist of all songs in the iTunes library which have no cover art. The new playlist is called (no big surpise there...) "No artwork". Kudos to Otto at ottodestruct.com who made this one; you can find other useful scripts at his site.

---------------------------cut here-------------------------
/* Rename me to NoArtPlaylist.js
Double Click in Explorer to run

Script by Otto - http://ottodestruct.com */

var iTunesApp = WScript.CreateObject("iTunes.Application");
var tracks = iTunesApp.LibraryPlaylist.Tracks;
var numTracks = tracks.Count;
var i;
NoArtPlaylist = iTunesApp.CreatePlaylist("No Artwork");

for (i = 1; i

ok.. windows user and first time itunes user here... i've read all the posts here but still i have to see if i got this clear hehe.
I have like, a really really (really) big bunch of albums and i can't download th album artowork from itms cause i don't have an account (and i can't make one).. so, to use the jukebox thingie i tried putting the artwork (right click->get info->artork) in the first album song.. and this automatically shows the correct album cover for all the songs in the album..

but, as far as i'm understanding this, i'm embedding the artwork just in this first song... now about the album cover folder, i get that it's only a cache (cause i deleted it and still i get the album covers and the folder creates again)... so if i want to have my album covers in other PC, i can't just copy this folder to other PC.... but my idea is to copy the first song of the album (wich has de album embedded) to the other PC and then iTunes will get the artwork...

am i right in this?

One interesting aspect of the Coverflow art is that if you get the artwork for a particular album (it is best to view the store to see if iTunes has it, or you risk getting a compilation cover) on XP, (I haven't tried it on the Mac yet), it displays at about 300 x 300. If you right click (Option click on Mac) on the artwork and select copy and then paste into the file, the artwork will now display at 600 x 600.
WARNING:
One aspect of 7 that I am seriously concerned about is that it doesn't seem to be updating the ID3 tags in the file (or worse, removing them). I ran some files through an intel duo core macbook converting to .mp3 from AAC (.m4a). The artist and album and track and year, etc. were stripped. Further, under Windows, I had a song that was filed under the wrong album. I changed the data in iTunes, went to the file on disk, moved it to a new album folder and dropped it back into iTunes. Whoa, the info I had just entered was gone, along with even the basic Artist field. I had to drop it into a blank playlist just to see what was going on, and sure enough, the data was gone. For further proof, I hovered the mouse over the file in XP, which usually gives me a box with .mp3 info. All that it says now is Type: Mpeg Layer 3 Audio, which means that the ID3 data has been stripped (I can usually see the album, year, track and duration). Yikes!

For those who are terrified of using music management software for fear that it may alter the file structure of their music library audio files can rest easy knowing that iTunes 7.0 will not modify the structure (size/shape) of your music files when using the Get Album Art feature.

To prove this I ran a before-and-after checksum verification using pdsfv on one of my rips. The result was that the audio files passed the CRC checksum verification following the use of the iTunes 7.0 Get Album Art feature. Bonus! >=]

As for those of you who are looking to dirty up your files with album art (Scot/Paul), you should listen to Andy Skogrand's recommendation. I couldn't have put it better myself.

iTunes 7.0 will not modify the structure (size/shape) of your music files when using the Get Album Art feature.

Of course it doesn't. This whole discussion is about how the album art feature doesn't insert art into files.

As for those of you who are looking to dirty up your files with album art (Scot/Paul), you should listen to Andy Skogrand's recommendation. I couldn't have put it better myself.

No one is looking for *mandatory* embedding of artwork - just the option to do so, and clarity from Apple on the two different methods and the two different means.

I save my itune songs on an external drive, which is about 150GB of data/songs. But...the new itunes stores album art on my local machine. Anyone know how to externally reference and store the album artwork folder externally? This file will grow and don't want the gigs stored on my local box. Thanks guys!

Just in case anyone is interested. If you have found that there are several of the same art work covers appearing in the view artwork frame for the same CD this is because some CD's in their artist title may say featuring so and so. If all those multiple covers are getting on your Nerves then deleat the extra print attached to the artist name and that should take care of it

I think the new method of storing album artwork explains why I've been having trouble with synchronizing the artwork to my iPod. The album artwork won't show up unless I copy the artwork, select all songs in the album -> get info, and then paste the image into the artwork box, and finally sync to iPod. It's kind of a pain - you think Apple would have caught something like that.

Hi- I've been using iTunes for years but only recently got a video iPod so most of my library has been devoid of album artwork. One problem I'm having is for albums that are not in the iTunes Music Store, particularly with Beatles albums. Here's what I've been doing: I play the first song in an album in iTunes, and then while it's playing I drag the album cover art from Amazon.com or something. Then the album cover shows up in the new "jukebox" view in iTunes. The album cover will show up when I play the first song on the album (in iTunes and on my iPod), but not any other songs. Do I have to copy and paste the image for every song on the album, or is there a better way to do this? Thanks in advance for your help!

I don't know if anybody realises this, but the artwork files that Apple is using are huge. Not the little 30k jobs that most of us drag off the net, but massive files that are usually more than 500k, even up to 1Mb. This is what makes the album Artwork folder big, and if these files were added to each individual file, it would make them much bigger. If you want to do that, best to keep to your own, small files

So can anyone explain this? I have absolutely no artwork from the automatic album cover feature in itunes 7 and yet for some reason there is a folder within my ipod called "artwork" about a gig in size. I have been adding album art manually to each album. Why is all of this space being taken up?

http://www.funkymuffin.com/itunes7.jpg

Great thread here...
I don't want the album art embedded, I want it stored in the Album Art folder.

Will iTunes search the enclosing folder (where the music files are stored) for a JPG and put an optimize/archived copy in the Album Art folder for you?

That is what CoverFlow did...but I don't think iTunes 7 does..

Frank - I never realized CoverFlow used to do that. Please let us know if it works with iTunes 7.

Have you checked iCoverArt. Is it a good way to store artwork into a file?

I actually want to use the .itc/Album Art folder option on some tracks - like the Lord of the Rings audio book that's in iTunes. It's over 1000 files and I don't really need art work embeded into those MP3s, but it would be cool to have art work associated with it.

Any knowledge on how to make that happen? Basically how can I manually add art but not embed it?

Um... I've read all of the posts here, but unless I am mistaken, none explain why the iTunes artwork shows much faster in cover flow view. Whilst using the central scroll bar, manually added artwork fails to show until the scroll bar is released. Is there an easy workaround, I wonder?

RSR - I think the reason is pretty clear - using CoverFlow view, iTunes doesn't need to read the artwork out of each individual file (and digging it out of MP3 header data has got to be even slower than reading a normal image file). As for a workaround, again, I think the only real solution is to have both - CoverFlow storage for performance and embedded for portability.

another thing i find is that itunes dosent copy the album are it downloads onto the ipod automatically. i have to do it manually. and for two hundred songs thats gonna take a while

I agree about the embedded versus new folder part, and like others I've had completely wrong art-work added (not even close some times) to my collection. The "bloat" factor is a bit of a problem... I keep my iTunes Library on a second hard drive. iTune 7 adds the artwork folder now in my Home Directory, one which I purposefully keep pared down and on another disk, a small partition (7GB). Adding artwork to this folder was a **half** a **gig** of space eaten up - I'd like to just toss the whole thing (can I?) and wait until Apple fixes this better.

along with artwork, i'm looking for other know ways or scripts to get id3 info (tracks, albums, lyrics, the whole shebang) automatically (for windows). i'd hate to go through each song separately in my library.

I agree that iTunes 7 has taken away my ability to embed cover art into the file. My mp3s that have downloaded .itc files display great covers in iTunes, but not in, say, Windows Media Player.

X

FWIW

I have been using a Window program called Tag&Rename that might do what you are looking for. One nice feature is taht it will look for Album covers and insert into each song.

total ipod newbie here. but how do you add art to your ipod after the songs have been added. i didnt think i would care about the cover art, but then got interested and added the art to all of my albums in my library on my computer. Since all i read says the art moves to the ipod with the song (when added to ipod), what do you do when the song has been added without the art already?

Hi, great info here!
But I have another anomaly (unless I am dense...). I'm ripping my songs in .wav and I find I CANNOT insert artwork from 3rd parties, ONLY artwork from songs that are available on the iT music store. I have a friend who has the same problem. With mp3 you CAN insert 3rd party artwork. So, can anybody confirm this? Is this a bug, or an Apple ploy to get us into the store?

Jan Didden

Jan - There is no way to insert artwork into WAV files. That has nothing to do with Apple - they can't change the way WAV works.

Very interesting discussion.
It seems that internally some .itc files are JFIF and some are PNG. Graphic converter will open the JFIF(JPEG) ones, but not the PNGs. Here is a link to a hint about opening the PNG based ones. If you can't open a .itc file, try this trick:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070313105356621&query=itc%2Bartwork%2Bpng

Hi,
Great blog, lots of useful info.
I have a related question. I recently converted to iTunes and lot of my music is WMA and MP3 imported using other ripping software such as CDextractor. If I convert all of the music files I own that are WMA or MP3 into AAC, will iTunes 7 recognize them and download the corresponding artwork or will that only work with files directly imported from CDs by iTunes itself? I ask because it seems all software capable of converting music files from one format to another is paying and I'd hate to spend 20 or 30 dollars for nothing. (Also interested in any free software you might know of that does this).

Thread seems like it might be dead but I'll give it a shot, since someone asked but I didn't really see it answered:
If I wanted to just delete everything in the Album Artwork Folder (a bunch of covers itunes fetched are wrong/associated incorrectly and I'd rather just start from scratch), how will that affect stability? If I understand this all correctly, songs will still be linked to those deleted .itc files in some database somewhere and that could cause some problems down the road.

I guess my question is, has anyone deleted the folder contents manually, is there another way to get rid of the contents, and is it "safe"?

Simon, I personally haven't heard of issues relating to deleting that folder, nor would I expect there to be, but you might try looking or asking in the macosxhints.com forums just to be sure. If you do it, please post here to let us know how it worked out.

I haven't tried totally deleting the folder yet but at the suggestion of someone on Apple's forums, I tried renaming the folder to see what would happen. Oddly enough when I enabled "show artwork", itunes still managed to find the incorrect covers for some cd's. It was mainly this one album/cover was assigned to a bunch of other albums for some reason. When I deleted the album off my ipod that seemed to solve the problem more or less. For curiosity's sake though, I'd still want to get to the bottom of this.

Either it's stored in another location also, itunes is somehow smart enough to know i renamed the folder, or since I've been playing with this app called floola for managing the ipod, that might have something to do with it. It was just weird because an album that floola showed as having no artwork, in itunes had incorrect artwork. The whole thing is very confusing. I've cross-posted this on floola's forums as well as the apple forums and macosxhints so hopefully someone can explain what's happening.

Unlike other operating systems, OS X apps can track the inode of files and folders, which means you can rename things and move them around with breaking stuff. You'll find the same thing if you manually rename a folder containing some MP3s - iTunes will not lose track of them (try that on Windows!). So it's not surprising that simply renaming the folder didn't have any effect.

Haha, I guess I should have mentioned by now that I'm using XP pro, which makes the fact that it still works very odd. If I don't figure anything else out, I'm going to try deleting the folder soon and seeing what happens.

Oh! Well, something else must be going on then... Sorry I couldn't help more on that.

I'm new to iTunes and the whole album-cover-art thing in general, and this thread has been really enlightening.

This was asked a few times previously, but with no answer, so I'll try again just in case... :) Does anyone know how to externally store manually added artwork, rather than embedding it in the music file? Right now, none of my music has the artwork embedded, and frankly, I'd like to keep it that way. The portability issues are not a concern for me.

Don't know if anyone else has had this problem, I use both Itunes and Windows Media Player (WMP is a lot faster on my comp) All my tagging and artwork is done in Itunes and WMP adds all the artwork fine. I applied the auto volume leveling in WMP when I went back into Itunes everything looked fine until I played a song, hey presto..... no more artwork. Anyone know how to get the artwork back (where did it go?)

In addition to my last post, All my artwork in Windows Media was still intact

Steve - Since this post is about the fact that iTunes stores artwork externally to the music files, it's a safe bet that WMP does the same thing. Therefore, if you're adding artwork through WMP, I wouldn't expect it to appear in iTunes as well.

Hi All,

I think the artwork is being handled poorly for a few reasons. I have worked with a lot of different audio software and this appears similiar to earlier versions of music match jukebox. Music match did a better job in that it left the artwork in jpeg format not 'itc'. It would be nice if the options were expanded in the preferences to save them as jpeg images and to save them in the album folder. Putting in a checkbox option to overwrite existing artfiles would give us a better solution. They also bury the artwork about 5 folders deep. If you want an easier way to retrieve portable artwork download an early version of Music Match (I think it was 7 or 8 - I can find out if anyone needs it) and open the program folder, the artwork is stored in a folder within the progam folder in jpeg format when the cd is imported. Unfortunately you will have to drag and drop the image to the appropriate album folder if you want the art with the music but at least it is in jpeg format.

Mike Ansbro
mptools.com

I have had frustration getting my cover art that I have downloaded from the iTunes music store across to the ipod. After reading this blogg, I understood the problem a bit better, and although doing the 'copy', 'clear downloaded artwork', 'paste' worked, it was tedious.

I instead used this script to embedd all the downloaded art into the MP3 file, so that it would then show on my ipod.

CAUTION : back up your music / itunes library before you runt his script!

Save the below into a file ConvertCoverArt.js, then double click from windows explorer.

--cut here---

var workingDirectory = "c:\\coverart\\";
var iTunes = WScript.GetObject("", "iTunes.Application");
var tracks = iTunes.LibraryPlaylist.tracks;
var i

for (i = 1; i < tracks.Count; i++)
{
var track = tracks.Item(i);

if (track.Artwork.Count > 0)
{
if (track.Artwork.Item(1).IsDownloadedArtwork)
{
var artwork = track.Artwork(1);
var fileName = workingDirectory + track.Index.toString() + ".jpg";
artwork.SaveArtworkToFile(fileName);
artwork.Delete();
track.AddArtworkFromFile(fileName);
}
}
}

WScript.Echo('Convertion Completed');

PS : the JPGs are saved to c:\coverart\ (you need to make sure this directory exists on your computer before you run the script).

This process can take a while if you have a large library (you can see the jpgs being created though to know that the process is working).

You should have an instance of iTunes open already before you run the script.

And a VB6 implementation if you are that way inclined:

-- cut here --

Public Sub ConvertDownloadedArtToEmbeddedArt()

Dim workingDirectory As String
Dim track As Object
Dim counter As Long
Dim fileName As String

Dim tracks As Object
Dim iTunes As Object

workingDirectory = "c:\coverart\"

Set iTunes = GetObject("", "iTunes.Application")

counter = 1
Set tracks = iTunes.LibraryPlaylist.tracks

For Each track In tracks
If track.Artwork.Count > 0 Then
If track.Artwork.Item(1).IsDownloadedArtwork Then
Debug.Print track.Album & " : " & track.Name
fileName = workingDirectory & track.Index & ".jpg"
track.Artwork.Item(1).SaveArtworkToFile fileName
track.Artwork.Item(1).Delete
track.AddArtworkFromFile fileName
End If
End If
Next track

End Sub

This may sound a bit conspiratorial or speculative, but it occurred to me that Apple might be releasing these UI changes into iTunes only as a sort of public testing ground, then watching the blogs and mailing lists to see what the real-world reactions are. If well-received, the changes migrate to the rest of Aqua. If not, they get the boot. Just a thought.

This is the damn truth. When I was a mite younger and more naive, I attempted to mass-download my artwork. It managed to fudge up around thirty percent of my artworks. As for the other problem, I agree completely. I wish there were an option to permanently write the art to the file. It's silly that when I transfer my music I have to find each piece of art again. Bleh.