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Grab (some) album covers from iTMS in iTunes 4.5 Apps
Usually when you rip a CD you already own, you'll most likely grab the (relatively small) 300x300 large cover from the likes of Amazon. Unless you have a scanner handy. Thanks to the new Wishlist feature in iTunes 4.5, however, you can get a higher resolution, perfectly square cover directly from the iTunes Music Store. The only real win here is that the covers on iTMS are usually larger and cropped better than those on sites like Amazon. The downside is that this doesn't work all of the time, and seems to fail more often on newer albums. And it's not as quick and easy as just dragging the cover art from Safari and onto iTunes.

Here's what to do: After you've ripped your music, create a new playlist (this is where you'll store your temporary wish list). Next, go to that albums page in the iTMS (enabling the iTMS Quick Links will make this faster, if you're updating a lot of albums). When you play a preview in iTMS, it will not show you the cover art -- in fact, opening iTMS closes the cover-art box. However, once you've dragged a preview track out of the iTMS and into a wish list, the cover art box will stay visible when playing the preview. Some, but not all tracks on iTMS will show the actual cover art of the album rather than the "Artwork Available on Purchase" notice. Just bring up the context-menu and choose Copy. Select all the tracks from the album in your Library, select 'Get Info' and paste the iTMS album art into the Artwork box.

From what little testing I have done, it would seem that someone has simply forgotten to remove the cover art from the previews. As I understand it, previews are made by the label and not Apple, and as such, you might find more covers embedded in previews from one label than in the previews of another. It also seems like there are more previews containing album covers for songs added during iTMS early days (first six to eight months, giver or take). It should be noted, that this might be against Apple's terms of use. And as it only affects some songs, it will most likely get fixed in coming updates -- either with "silent" updates within the Store, or through a direct patch of iTunes.

[robg adds: I tested this a bit, and found that most of the older stuff had album covers available, but there were basically none available for the newer stuff. I don't see much of an issue with this technique, as the cover art is certainly available to you if you own the CD (you'd just need a scanner or digital camera to shoot it), or you can get it via Amazon or any number of other retail-type sites ... and the bandwidth hit to the iTMS, compared to playing even one 30-second preview, is minimal...]
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Grab (some) album covers from iTMS in iTunes 4.5 | 9 comments | Create New Account
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Grab (some) album covers from iTMS in iTunes 4.5
Authored by: rhowell on May 17, '04 11:59:15AM
Getting album art from Amazon will often get you library stickers, yard sale stickers, etc. included on the cover! Like here:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002G1T.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

I've never had this problem with iTMS though.

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Grab (some) album covers from iTMS in iTunes 4.5
Authored by: rhowell on May 17, '04 12:02:46PM
And the scans can be skewed, too:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002NBY.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Professional scanning at its best!

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Walmart for album art
Authored by: gidds on May 17, '04 12:07:36PM
Does this apply to those of us in the third world (at least as far as Apple's concerned) who can't use the iTMS?

Anyway, Amazon's only my second-choice source of album cover art: the best results are from Walmart. I make no comment about their trade practices &c... but they do have very high quality scans for all their albums -- 500x500, perfectly square, strong colours, low noise, good contrast. Not as wide a selection as Amazon, but still pretty good, and well worth trying first.

---

Andy/

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Walmart for album art
Authored by: jdb8167 on May 17, '04 07:22:02PM

Thank you. I never thought of Walmart. Found beautiful cover art for an album that I never had anything better than 120x120 before.



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Grab (some) album covers from iTMS in iTunes 4.5
Authored by: maddys_daddy on May 17, '04 12:26:32PM
I use Fetch Art, Since the few posts here to this point seem to not like Amazon's art, this may not be of much use to these posters, since it uses Amazon as a source. But it's ease of use and time saving benefits have made it an invaluable iTunes accessory for me. And I've added artwork to about 500 songs so far (about 300 different album covers), and haven't found any that were screwed up, skewed, or stickered (although I have certainly seen these things on Amazon's website). It installs itself into iTunes Script menu, and to use it, you simply highlight (select) the song(s) you need art for, and click Fetch Art in the scripts menu. Fetch Art will give you a chance to preview the art before you tag your songs with it, so as to preclude importing bad artwork. Since you can do multiple songs at a time, from different albums/artists, this is a real timesaver. Love it.

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Grab (some) album covers from iTMS in iTunes 4.5
Authored by: hfvienna on May 17, '04 01:07:18PM

The by far most elegant way is to use Clutter from Sprote Research, which looks automatically at amazon us or uk for the cover and you can even let it paste into your iTunes list (for all titles on the selected CD!) , just marvellous.



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automated artwork gettin' with Itunes Catalog
Authored by: martygearbox on May 17, '04 01:17:42PM

If automation is more important than quality, 'iTunes Catalog' does a great job of collecting artwork from Amazon (and others) and applying it to your Library. You can download artwork for your entire library, then apply the artwork to your entire library. Saved me hours and hours.



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Another tool!
Authored by: DizzyPenguin on May 17, '04 02:52:39PM
And also, if auomation is what you're looking for, then... plug alert!
Have a look at and try out Export Artwork. It's not free but doesn't cost the moon either! It's got a nice set of features (if I say so myself :)), including exporting to image file, fetching, embedding.

---
DizzyPenguin

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Grab (some) album covers from iTMS in iTunes 4.5
Authored by: Fofer on May 19, '04 06:33:59PM

Then there is also MPFreaker:
http://www.lairware.com/mpfreaker/
"Imagine a program that automatically fills in the missing information in your music library — including artwork! Using innovative techniques, MPFreaker quickly searches the internet to find out which album your song belongs to, the year your song was released, the genre, track numbers, even album cover artwork. In seconds, all of this information is automatically added directly into your song files. "



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