[macfantn]

I added each album cover to each song individually. is this the best way for this? if so doesn't this just add the art to the mp3 file, if so why do i have a separate album called album artwork that is 105mb? it has a bunch of weird numbered folders in it. what is all this? can I delete it?

[macfantn]

anyone?

[::maroma::]

Well I can try to answer one of your questions.

I don't know how you are adding your cover art, but iTunes has a "Get Album Artwork" under the Advanced menu. You can select however many you want iTunes to grab album art for. I'm not too sure of how well this works, since it seems to be hit and miss as to what it gets art for.

If you're adding your own artwork manually, you can select entire albums and Get Info and add art to all of the tracks at once. This is how I added my artwork when I was ripping all of my CDs.

And if I'm not mistaken there are some apps out there that will grab artwork for you as well. I've never used any of those though.

I don't know about how iTunes attaches artwork to the files. I've heard it embeds it in the file itself, but that wouldn't explain what that folder is all about.

[Earth Mk. II]

Also, iTunes will set the Album's artwork to be the artwork of first song with art on that album.* If you download art from iTunes, it stores it in a separate database and only references it from the library, so the whole album shares the same image data - slightly more efficient from a storage perspective.


* This only applies to "album" and "coverflow" views, and the instant this file disappears from your iPod or iTunes library, you're back to having no art.

[all2ofme]

Album art on iTunes is a funny beast. What I've noticed:

- MOST of the time the art that iTunes downloads itself is excellent quality (generally 600x600)
- even if I have high quality (much higher resolutions included) artwork and add it myself it won't look as good as the Apple equivalent. I've not managed to work out how this is possible
- Apple's method of storing it in the Album Artwork folder might be better for some reasons (storage requirements and perhaps performance), but it's not when something goes wrong with your iTunes Library file. Mine went west a couple of days ago and I've lost a good deal of album art as a result. The ones that were embedded in the files themselves are fine

YMMV, but I'd love it if there were a better, consistent way of dealing with these things. If iTunes' model of referencing an album with one image could be made to be a bit more resilient then I'd be tempted to go that route, because the way I use art means that unless I'm careful I could have multiple images against a given track (which I don't want). I want a single, high quality file that displays in iTunes and on the devices I feed tunes to.

Anyone got a great method for managing artwork for the anal among us?