Grab (some) album covers from iTMS in iTunes 4.5

May 17, '04 09:02:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

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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