[apple007]

I ripped my CDs well before iTunes would automatically download album art. As a result, the music I ripped from CDs still has the album art I imported manually to iTunes (most of which was grabbed from Amazon.com). While OK, the album art from the iTunes store seems to be higher quality, and scales to fill the iPhone screen (as opposed to my album art, which tends to be about 10% smaller).

I don't have much exotic music and I'd bet 90% or more of my CD music is available from the iTunes Store. Thus, I should be able to replace most or all of my album art with that from the ITS.

People didn't seem to be overly thrilled with the early performance of iTunes' "get album art" feature, but how is it working these days? Is it fast/reliable, or a hassle to use? Further, how quirky is it? I've probably corrected hundreds of typos, etc., over the years from the ITS and CDDB/Gracenote; do songs in iTunes need to exactly match those from the ITS to download the album art (i.e., do capitalization differences, spelling errors, etc., muck up the process)?

Thanks very much for all feedback.

[turbulentfurball]

I've seen it made a hash of a couple of compilations (example: a soundtrack CD's tracks were all given the artwork for the first song's original album), but other than that I've had no issues.

[apple007]

Thanks for the reply.

Couple more questions:

1. How exactly does the "get album artwork" command work? If you select it, does iTunes just go nuts trying to download art for all songs currently missing artwork, or does it allow some on-the-fly control?

2. I'm under the impression iTunes will only try to download artwork for songs that have no artwork at all. Is this correct, or does iTunes try to update or change the artwork for songs that already have artwork stored?

Thanks again.

[InactionMan]

As far as I know it'll only try to download art for albums without any album art.

If you use the Get Album Art command in the Advanced menu it'll burn through your entire library. If you select a single track or all the tracks from an album and right-click you can choose to just get the art for those tracks. It'll also give you the option to clear any previous album art.

[709]

I only check iTunes for album art if I'm having trouble finding it elsewhere. There's been a few times it's come through for me, but 99% of the time I'll first look at Walmart (!)(yes, they have high-quality artwork for albums with no swearing), Amazon's MP3 store (better artwork than the hard-copies they sell), Google (obviously) and Album Art Exchange (linky).

[Gargoyle]

it depends on how accurate your ID3 tags are, it Gets the images base on album and artist name

[PKIDelirium]

And even then, it sometimes totally screws up...

[dmegatool]

What's wrong with that cover ?

[PKIDelirium]

Because it's for the School of Rock soundtrack album?

[Miko]

iTunes is ok at finding album art but as Gargoyle said, it applies the art by "Album Artists" I've had several instances where I had a separate album cover for each track because the album artist name was different or not there at all.

In list view not so bad, but in Cover Flow or Album view it sucks having 17 separate listings all with the same album art when it should just be one. Easy fix though.

[MagSafe]

I ended up doing what your think of doing, replacing my Amazon artwork with the iTunes stuff. It works fine, you do have to make sure you name everything the same as on iTunes, but apart from that it almost always downloads the correct things for me.