MethodShop: Album Art the Easy Way

2/08/2005

Album Art the Easy Way

11:19 AM

Ask and ye shall receive. This weekend, while moving my entire iTunes library from one machine to another, I noticed how few of the Albums in my collection had the all important "Album Art" (ok so not exactly a critical component for organizing or playing back digital music but if you have songs from the likes of Jessica Simpson or Lindsay Lohan just about the only good thing about the album is the half naked pictures of them on the cover). While my schedule isn't quite as hectic as your average former Mouseketeer I still didn't see myself taking countless hours out of my free time to manually download the appropriate pics and plugging them into my iTunes library.

Well LifeHacker.com points out a cool utility from YVG Software Services called 'iTunes Art Importer' that does all the work for you.

"iTunes Art Importer for Windows automagically adds album cover images to your iTunes library. Select songs in your iTunes library and the importer will grab album cover images from Amazon.com. If you trust the importer to choose the right albums (it’s pretty good), select all your songs, check off “Auto-import best guess” and watch it go. The iTunes Art Importer works well and seems to be free but it does require the monstrous Microsoft .NET framework to run (link to download at the Importer site)." [Via LifeHacker.com]

You can download and check out the software by clicking here. (YVG Software)

Give it a shot and let us know how it works in the comments section.

Posted by the Hamster of AngryHamster.com

Post a Comment

permanent link | 11:19 AM

| AH

sweet thanks!!!

[*] posted by Anonymous : February 08, 2005 12:38 PM

you are the best. i'm gonna try it later tonight.

[*] posted by Anonymous : February 08, 2005 12:54 PM

cute

[*] posted by Anonymous : February 09, 2005 12:38 PM

Does not work.
Period.

[*] posted by Anonymous : September 15, 2005 5:30 PM

Thanks a ton for the app. I suggest you rtfm too, good info from the designer.

[*] posted by Anonymous : September 22, 2005 11:40 PM

is this for nano too?

[*] posted by Anonymous : October 11, 2005 5:01 PM

Great for desktop iTunes, but Amazon's album pics are too big to display in iPod Photo or Video, meaning these art files won't display on the portable device, which requires 155x155 pixel sized images to display properly. Now if they would only resize when downloading, or find a better pic source than Amazon...

[*] posted by John and Wendy : December 03, 2005 10:26 AM

Mate that's not true like, because I don't seem to have this problem, i have a 60gb ipod photo and the pics look great

[*] posted by Philip Currie : December 15, 2005 10:58 AM

Works perfectly for getting album art for your iPod video or photo, contrary to a previous comment.

Kind of buggy, definitely won't automatically get through your entire collection without crashing. If you're patient, you will have success.

[*] posted by Anonymous : December 26, 2005 8:55 PM

I got it to display on iTunes, but NOT on my NANO - and it crashed a few times, it's alright, it having it on your desktop is what you're looking for

[*] posted by Anonymous : December 28, 2005 10:40 PM

yeah i can see the album art on itunes but not on my ipod video

[*] posted by Anonymous : December 31, 2005 11:05 PM

I use iTunes 6 and can't get this program to read my iTunes library. I get an error on startup, but the program interface certainly looks cool if I can figure out why it wont't work with iTunes 6!

[*] posted by Anonymous : January 02, 2006 9:50 AM

I need some help. I am getting an error reading all of the sudden when I am using art importer. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Says something about just-in-time (JIT) debugging.

[*] posted by Anonymous : January 07, 2006 4:49 PM

so.... does anyone know how to get the album art on my 2 gb nano?
Ive tried several things, including right clicking the track and go to "info" butten and manuly find a pic off internet, and it still didnt show up on my nano, but it did on iTunes v 5

[*] posted by Anonymous : January 09, 2006 10:13 PM

You don't need to write "period" you gay American twirp. It works perfectly, if you're not a tool. Full-stop!

[*] posted by Anonymous : January 28, 2006 2:00 AM

Guys can you tell me what is wrong here, it displays fine on itunes with good quality pics but the ipod dosent get any of the pics, I mean why does it have to be so complicated?

[*] posted by Anonymous : February 01, 2006 4:54 PM

In Itunes, go into Ipod settings, there is an option to display art on ipod. Needs to be ticked, natch.

[*] posted by Anonymous : February 05, 2006 6:09 PM

you must add album art to files on ur computer first.. then drag them to the ipod.. its the only way it will work ive found... hope this helps..

[*] posted by Anonymous : February 06, 2006 10:28 AM

fantastic, it works a treat and has undoubtedly saves me loads of time

[*] posted by Anonymous : March 01, 2006 9:34 AM

If you are having trouble viewing the album art on your iPod video or nano and you do have "view album art" enabled, then what you have to do is convert your ID3 tags to the highest version. You also have to conver your music to AAC. This will now allow you to view your art on your iPod. I had this problem for some time and finally found out that the music has to be encoded by iTunes, which then allows you to view the album art.

Hope this was helpful.

[*] posted by Anonymous : March 16, 2006 11:52 PM

Fantastic,

Just what i have spent the last 4 hours looking for via Apple....then i stumbled across this..will tell evryone i know.. fantastic THANK YOU SO MUCH !!

Life is Illusion Why Rush ??

[*] posted by Anonymous : March 17, 2006 2:07 PM

is there an silimar program/application for apple and aac not mp3?

[*] posted by Anonymous : May 03, 2006 5:23 AM

how do you convert to aac
and yes, its called clutter

[*] posted by Anonymous : July 15, 2006 7:46 PM

Thanks to the March 16 guy. I was having trouble getting it shown I never would have figured to convert the music to AAC (even though half my music was AAC already, I picked the wrong half to test on, stupid me).

[*] posted by Anonymous : July 20, 2006 6:39 PM

FYI. I got it to work by following the post of feb 06. It sounds like apple has some work to do on this subject.

[*] posted by Anonymous : July 28, 2006 2:27 AM

why wont mine find any album covers at all?

[*] posted by posty : May 11, 2008 2:38 PM