[rhythmdevils]

I wanted to post this as a heads up to everyone.  I just spent a long time talking to apple technical support about it. 
 
I had a strange bug in my itunes library where itunes changed the file pathways for random songs throughout my entire library.  The actual files were there, in my itunes music folder.  But itunes thought they were somewhere else, and was confident enough in this mistake that there was no "!" next to the song, though it couldn't be played or added to an ipod/iphone. 
 
Long story short, the only fix was to start itunes from scratch and re-import all my music and playlists.  (though I wound up loosing some playlists because I didn't save them.  You should backup all your playslists that are important to you by exporting them)
 
In doing this, I loose all the album artwork that I painstakingly added manually, or with an app called album gofer.  The only artwork that itunes is able to re-connect with the albums and songs are the ones added through the built in album artwork finder in itunes. 
 
So don't add album artwork manually, or with outside apps if you can help it.  Because sooner or later, you'll get a new computer, or something will go wrong and you'll have to re-import all your music, and you'll loose all of it. 
 
I think this is pretty weak because itunes doesn't have everything.  So if you want all the more obscure albums to have artwork, you just have to re-do it everytime this happens.  This has already happened to me twice and will surely happen again.  But it won't be as painful next time because I will use the built in feature for everything I can.
 
Hope this is useful!

 

[TheWuss]

yep.  happened to me once.  and, once bitten, twice shy. 
so i now do artwork as part of the mp3 tag.
 
the only drawback is that it adds the full size of the image file to each mp3.  so your library will be somewhat larger.
 
i guess apple's reasoning behind their approach is that the album art image is only loaded once, and not duplicated for each track.
this becomes more important on a portable player like an ipod.  (my 160 gb ipod now has like a gig of album artwork.  and that would be much smaller if i did it apple's way...)
 
itunes is so frustrating.  i've started using foobar for the crossfeed feature, but can't fully pull away from itunes (because of purchased music, better cataloging, etc...) 

 

[rhythmdevils]

So how do you add artwork as part of the mp3 tag? The tech support guy didn't mention that. I can sacrifice 1 gig out of 160! Not a problem. Yeah iTunes needs to get their act together. If there was a viable alternative I would leave iTunes for good over this. Do you know how much time I've spent adding artwork that is now lost?

 

[Jaska]

Quite simple. If you're downloading artwork from the iTunes Store, just drag the artwork to your desktop. Then select all the tracks in the album, right-click and clear the downloaded artwork. With all tracks in the album still selected, drag the image from the desktop back to the artwork viewer in the lower left part of the iTunes window.
 
Note: The process is the same whether you're using iTunes for Mac or Windows, but on Windows, the artwork image file will be much larger (bmp), so you may want to use an image editor to convert them to JPEG first (and lose a bit of image quality in the process), otherwise each track in the album will increase in size by about a megabyte.

 

[TheWuss]

2 ways...
 
first way:
1.  right click on album and click "get album artwork".
2.  right click the artwork (lower left pane in itunes) and select "copy".
3.  select all songs again, and right click and select "clear downloaded artwork".
4.  right click the artwork pane, now empty, and select "paste".
 
so, basically what you're doing there is taking the artwork that itunes downloaded and pasting it into the mp3s themselves.  it attaches the image to each song's metafile.
 
second way (this is if itunes cannot find the artwork):
1.  find image online that is suitable, and right click and "copy" the image to your clipboard.
2.  select all album tracks, and right click in the artwork pane and paste.

 

[TheWuss]

Quote:

Quite simple. If you're downloading artwork from the iTunes Store, just drag the artwork to your desktop. Then select all the tracks in the album, right-click and clear the downloaded artwork. With all tracks in the album still selected, drag the image from the desktop back to the artwork viewer in the lower left part of the iTunes window.
 
Note: The process is the same whether you're using iTunes for Mac or Windows, but on Windows, the artwork image file will be much larger (bmp), so you may want to use an image editor to convert them to JPEG first (and lose a bit of image quality in the process), otherwise each track in the album will increase in size by about a megabyte.

you don't have to drag the artwork to your desktop.  not a necessary step.  you can instead simply copy it to the clipboard, then clear art, then paste it.

 

[TheWuss]

fyi, i believe all the itunes downloaded images are 600 x 600 pixels.
if you want larger or smaller album art, then it's best to grab from the web...

 

[rhythmdevils]

Quote:

 
second way (this is if itunes cannot find the artwork):
1.  find image online that is suitable, and right click and "copy" the image to your clipboard.
2.  select all album tracks, and right click in the artwork pane and paste.

 
This is how I added all my artwork manually, and itunes still lost it when I had to re-import my library.  So I'm not sure this is actually a "permanent" solution
 

 

[TheWuss]

strange, as this should not have happened.
 
a quandry.  and now you've got me worried... 

 

[TheWuss]

are you importing in mp3 fomat or some other format?
that could be the culprit.
 
mp3 has metafile tagging, wherein you can save all the data about the song and the artwork.
and, no matter the player type you use, when you open that track, all this data will come along with it.
 
but, AAC or other file types, itunes places the artwork in a proprietary folder, and if it "loses touch" with that folder, then it's gone.

 

[rhythmdevils]

I use Apple Losless if I buy the CD, and if it's a download, it's whatever format, but usually mp3
 
 
It seems then if that's the case, then the best way to get album artwork is by using the built in itunes artwork finder.  Because itunes can recognize some sort of code it uses to connect the images to the albums.

 

[limpidglitch]

Quote:

 
This is how I added all my artwork manually, and itunes still lost it when I had to re-import my library.  So I'm not sure this is actually a "permanent" solution
 

Strange indeed, because that's the way I'm doing it, and the artwork gets imbedded to the mp3/aac file.
On numerous occasions I've loaded up a DVD, memory stick, external HD or my Clip with albums and imported them to other machines, and all the artwork is still there.

 

[rhythmdevils]

weird.  Well how do you add album artwork without embedding it in the music file?  The ways we talked about doing it are pretty much the only ways to do it.  Except for doing it in the "get info" dialogue box

 

[poo]

I use tagr, works a treat!
 
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/audio/tagr.html
 
ALAC & MP3 only ATM.

 

[rhythmdevils]

apple tech support is just great.  The guy I talked to had me restart the computer holding down the control + command + r + p keys and it erased my entire drive, all my apps. settings, documents.  everything.  So not only did I loose all my album artwork and playlists, but everything else too. 
 
Good thing the most important stuff is on external drives.  But that sure was a doozy