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Grab iTunes artwork for any song in the music store Apps
I was playing around with the new iTunes 7 with the "Automatically download missing album artwork" option set, and I clicked on the Advanced > Get Album Artwork menu item. I noticed that the 30 second previews from the store, which I had dragged into a playlist as a wish list, were also updated with the artwork.

This means I could trigger the update on wish list tracks, then open the Info window (Command-I), go to the Artwork tab, click to highlight the artwork and copy. From there, I could and paste it into Preview, and bingo you've got artwork ... though you probably like the song anyway.

[robg adds: This technique could be useful for songs that, for some reason, just won't find artwork in the store -- even though the song itself is in the store. Just paste the image into the troublesome track's artwork, instead of into Preview. A couple people I've spoken to have seen this "no match even though they have the song" issue.]
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Grab iTunes artwork for any song in the music store | 8 comments | Create New Account
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Clutter
Authored by: MattHaffner on Sep 15, '06 09:02:32AM
Remember that you can still manually paste in artwork from other sources.

A great utility to do this semi-automatically is Clutter (http://www.sprote.com/clutter/), which pulls from Amazon instead of iTMS and then allows you to import the pic into all tracks for an album with a menu click.

Synergy (http://wincent.com/a/products/synergy-classic/), the slim & slick menubar/hotkey iTunes controller, also looks up artwork for you and allows you to copy it into the track.

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Grab iTunes artwork for any song in the music store
Authored by: jjardoino on Sep 15, '06 09:54:32AM

Using a wish list is not necessary. This trick works with any (not smart) playlist :-)

---
jjardoino
France
http://www.graffitix.com



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Grab iTunes artwork for any song in the music store
Authored by: allanmarcus on Sep 15, '06 11:42:45AM

I think iTunes 7 doesn't store the art in the tacks; it stores it separately and is dynamically linked based on the Album name. This means you don't store the art multiple times (once for every track).



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Well, this is a little annoying
Authored by: lionel77 on Sep 15, '06 04:11:33PM

Just confirmed this, the album art you get through iTunes 7's "Get Album Artwork" feature is indeed not written into the actual music files (unlike the covers you put into iTunes manually). I think this is really a retarded idea. Those covers from the iTunes Store are something in the order of 60-70k, so it really does not make much difference in terms of file size. Not embedding the covers, however, can cause a lot of inconveniences when you are moving tracks between machines.

Fortunately, there is a relatively simple way to manually embed the images: just do right-click->copy on the cover preview field, select all the tracks that belong to the album, and then do another right-click on the cover preview field and choose 'paste'. Voila, now the image is written into the tag of the actual music files on your hard drive.



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Small correction
Authored by: lionel77 on Sep 16, '06 12:55:11PM
just do right-click->copy on the cover preview field, select all the tracks that belong to the album, and then do another right-click on the cover preview field and choose 'paste'.
Actually, just pasting it into the cover preview field is not sufficient (if the old cover is still in there). Instead you want invoke a "Get Info" dialog (via command+i) after you've selected all the tracks and paste the cover into the artwork box there. Sorry for this inaccuracy.

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Grab iTunes artwork for any song in the music store
Authored by: vocaro on Sep 17, '06 10:12:37PM

Doesn't work for me. No matter what I do, the artwork for the preview still says "Artwork Available When Purchased."



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Grab iTunes artwork for any song in the music store
Authored by: Swordfish on Sep 18, '06 07:50:34PM

Same here. Doesn't work.



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Grab iTunes artwork for any song in the music store
Authored by: Swordfish on Sep 18, '06 07:52:35PM

Works now. WTF? Completely random...



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