Filed under: Audio, Design, Fun, Internet, Photo, Windows, Macintosh, Web services, Apple, Freeware, How-Tos
How to fix your iTunes artwork
by Jason Clarke Nov 30th 2006 at 6:00PM
I recently learned a little trick that helped me to fix the artwork that was associated with the songs in my music collection. Over the past few years, I've used a number of different artwork importing tools, with varied results. Although for the most part everything was fine, I began to find that the images that were coming up for some of my songs were completely incorrect. At first it didn't concern me too much, but when it reached a point where one in five songs had the wrong album art, I started to get annoyed. My first thought was that since iTunes now affords the ability to automatically import high-quality album art images, I might as well take advantage of that fact. So I finally jumped through the hoops that Apple makes you jump through (namely, signing up for an iTunes Store account with a valid credit card - no matter, since I don't intend to buy anything), and I was finally able to check the little option to automatically download missing album art. Of course, although this will help me gather up the missing bits, it does nothing to fix the ones that are currently wrong.
No matter, I though, I'll simply use the right-click option (I'm a Windows user - I'm not sure what the Mac equivalent is... something like Command-Shift-CapsLock-Tab Click while patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time - okay, sorry... that was uncalled for) to clear downloaded album art. Feeling proud of myself for thinking of it, I promptly highlighted my entire music collection (might as well fix 'em all at once, right?), and chose Clear Downloaded Artwork from the context menu. Unfortunately, here's what I saw:
Crossing my fingers, I clicked the Clear Downloaded Artwork button, only to find that the vast majority of my album artwork (including the wrong stuff) still existed. Crap. Now what?
I couldn't believe that there would be no way in iTunes to clear embedded album artwork from an MP3 file. It took some digging, but I finally figured it out. Maybe I'm the only person that is interested in this particular feature of iTunes, but it took me a while to find it, so I'm writing it up here in the hopes it helps someone else.
The secret is to choose Get Info from the context menu, rather than Clear Downloaded Artwork. This doesn't seem entirely intuitive, but trust me on this one. Try it with one song, if you like, just to see what I mean, but I promise it also works if you select a bunch of songs. If you select one song, simply click on the Artwork tab (the last one), highlight the image and click the delete button. If you're selecting a group of songs, it will ask if you want to edit information for multiple items (choose yes), then you get a more generic dialog, that looks like this:
Notice the checkmark in the checkbox beside the big Artwork box. I did that for you - you're welcome. So here's the deal, and it's the part I had the hardest time wrapping my head around, but it works. The trick is to check this box, like I just did here. When you click OK, having this checked will remove all associated album artwork from the songs you selected.
Depending on how many songs you had selected, this can take a bit of time, since it's chugging through all of your songs removing the image from the song file. But when you're done, you've got a nice clean set of song files, and iTunes will now dutifully download the appropriate artwork for each file as you play it. Of course, now you can right-click and choose "Get Album Artwork" for the set. In my experience that will work for some of the songs, and it's worth doing... but you'll want to leave the option checked to automatically download missing artwork, just in case it misses some.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
straylight said 12:41AM on 12-01-2006
YIPEE this worked. Thanks for ending a completely frustrating situation.
Stray
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magichew said 12:41AM on 12-01-2006
Yeah, I've done this many times and it works a treat. Good call sharing it.
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Dave Provost said 12:42AM on 12-01-2006
I've been using the iTunes Art Importer for some time now, and I have been very pleased with the results.
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kyle said 12:42AM on 12-01-2006
being methodical about this really helps. every time i aquire a new album the first thing that i do is to go to amazon and get the album art, and then make sure that everything is tagged correctly. now i have a beautiful music collection
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ASM said 12:42AM on 12-01-2006
Along these lines:
Is it possible to find 'Album' title while just having the Song Title and Artist information.
I have thousands of mp3s that are from my pre-anal-retentive days (3+ yrs ago) when all I cared about was Song Title and Artist...
Now I cringe every time I open iTunes and see songs without Album Titles or Album Titles that say something like '**RiPm@sT3R**911**l33t!'.
Help Please!
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paul said 2:49AM on 12-01-2006
You write for a tech blog. Shouldn't you know that Macs come with two-button mice?
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salvo said 12:42AM on 12-01-2006
I don't know if it's a bit offtopic here, but:
Assume I have a big collection of mp3, sorted in folder by Artist\Album and each folder has its own "folder.jpg"
Is there any way to import CD covers into itunes (i.e. convert the folder.jpg) in order to see the cover art in itunes and -hopefully- on my ipod nano? OR, if not,
how do I get proper CD cover art in itunes (using windows OS) WITHOUT having an itunes account?
thanks..
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salvo said 5:56AM on 12-01-2006
Don't know if it's a bit offtopic here...
How can I import "folder.jpg" into itunes -OR- how can I download cover art into itunes WITHOUT an itunes account (I have no credit card)?
Is there anyone of you geeky people that can help me? ;-)
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theRat said 12:43AM on 12-01-2006
@3: You might want to try musicBrainz. It will go through your files and correct tags with help of their server. Of course, it requires you checking if every album is ok, but it does the job.
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Slash said 12:43AM on 12-01-2006
Itunes Art Importer
http://www.yvg.com/itunesartimporter.shtml
It searches amazon for the cd cover.
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MacMan said 5:24AM on 12-01-2006
YEEAAAAAHHH!
(what he said)
Im like in year 8 and i already knew this stuff.
so now i feel special.
Good Job, Itunes can be so stupid/confusing/gay.
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Andy said 8:56PM on 12-01-2006
Be careful deleting ALL your artwork.
iTunes can only import cover art for what it sells in the iTunes store. So for instance, if you have art for mashups, independent artists not on iTunes, or The Beatles, iTunes won't find the cover art for you.
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moovyphreak said 9:17AM on 12-01-2006
How ironic that you posted this, as I just figured this out earlier this week after multiple Google searches. The Album Artwork feature takes up quite a bit of space when you are quickly running out of room on a 40GB iPod.
[quote]
5. Along these lines:
Is it possible to find 'Album' title while just having the Song Title and Artist information.
I have thousands of mp3s that are from my pre-anal-retentive days (3+ yrs ago) when all I cared about was Song Title and Artist...
Now I cringe every time I open iTunes and see songs without Album Titles or Album Titles that say something like '**RiPm@sT3R**911**l33t!'.
Help Please![/quote]
I am not sure if there's software out there that will scan your music collection in iTunes to correct this. I just manually edited my collection and used http://www.gracenote.com/music/ to find the proper missing info when I needed it.
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James said 9:24AM on 12-01-2006
Right-Click on the Macintosh is.... Right-click.... Same as in Windows
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Macnerd said 9:53AM on 12-01-2006
Yeah, the click comment was uncalled for - You're right. If it wasn't for us "weird" Apple people you wouldn't even be using iTunes. Worse still, you might have a Zune.
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Zweirad said 10:41AM on 12-01-2006
I also use Wikipedia for album art. Amazon has smaller JPEGs for the most part. The cool thing about Wikipedia is that really obscure stuff will often show up. Amazon is great if all your tunes are relatively common. One other searching tip for those indie tracks: search by the actual file name in Google. Sometimes you get lucky.
The good thing about iTunes 7 is that you can scroll through the cover art and see what's not right. The iTunes Music Store often will pick the most recent or common cover for a track, not necessarily the correct one. This happens most often with greatest hit collections and other compilations.
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GTD Wannabe said 11:30AM on 12-01-2006
Re adding artwork without an Itunes account. Do the same thing described above to get into a particular song's (actually pick the whole album) artwork, but double-click on the big thumbnail box for Album artwork. That'll open a dialog box, asking you to navigate to an image on your hard drive. Find the image you already have, and presto.
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Everton said 10:52AM on 12-01-2006
I wouldn't recommend doing using iTunes to add/manage artwork as it only adds the artwork to it's own database, and not to the actual mp3 itself.
This will cause users problems further down the road if they switch to another mp3 player (zune maybe?) or if they want to use another media player like WMP11.
Adding the art via another app is advisable:
http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2006/10/24/1002/
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Eric said 2:26PM on 12-01-2006
Are you using Vista? Or is that XP with a theme. Either way, I like. Could you please let me know how you got windows to look like that. (Unless the procedure involves right clicking, I use a mac mouse...)
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Jeff Benson said 2:41PM on 12-01-2006
"Everton" is completely mistaken. iTunes has the facility to embed album artwork directly into .mp3 files. I've been using that feature for years.
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