[atlcane]

I am amazed at the crappiness of this product. I have about 3000 songs from my old CD collection that are in my itunes library. itunes could fill less than half with album art. The majority of the unfilled album art could be found in the iTunes Music Store, which leaves me confused as to why the album art did not upload. Is anyone elase having this problem?

[Elektrix]

I didn't have any problem at all, it filled in pretty much all of my album art for mp3's I had where the artist and album were properly labelled.

By any chance are there any differences in the artist name and album name between what you have and what the iTMS says for the same album? I can see that as being a potential problem.

Either way, give me a break........... something to add in album art automatically is a bonus; complaining about it being crappy because it doesn't work perfectly for you seems like a bit much. Just go to allmusic.com or whatever and fill in whatever album art it couldn't figure out by itself.

[JMII]

I got the same problem - only about 1/2 my collection was updated. I know the tags are right because they link up to the iTunes store. So assumed I could just drag-n-drop the art from iTMS into the missing album area at the bottom left... NOPE, doesn't work that way.

However after some research I did find some tags that were off by very small differences, things like capital letters or a single space will cause problems despite the links (little arrows) working. My guess is the links work because they SEARCH the iTMS where as the Find Album Art feature only works on a prefect match. Overall I was expecting something alittle more intuitive, more along the lines of: iTunes has found art to the album "Blah, Blah, Blah" is this the same as "Blah-Blah-Blah" by the same artist?

The other problem is it scans you entire collection from the start to finish each time which means it takes a LONG time once if do find a mistake in your tags. I've run the scan three times now and each time it grabs a few more pieces of art, so maybe the server is just getting hammered with requests right now?

[slffl]

Are these songs you have ripped from a CD or downloaded? Maybe iTMS is using the database that it accesses when you rip a CD and doesn't really care if you have some messed up ID3 tags on downloaded mp3s.

[JamesKass]

I'm guessing it's being hammered... each time I re-run it, it grabs a few more.

[vapspwi]

I messed around with the album art feature in iTunes 7 for Windows last night for a bit. I came across a few things that might be of interest.

1. It appears that the album art server is getting hammered. I verified that certain albums were present in the iTunes Store, and sometimes had to manually select "get album art" for that album 10-20 times before it would finally connect and download.

2. Some albums that don't show up in the iTunes Store can still download album art. There were a few cases where most but not all albums by an artist showed up in the store, but I was able to get art for even the album that didn't show up.

3. Album titles matter. There's a bit of leeway in the album titles sometimes, but if you see an album in the store and the art won't download, rename the album to EXACTLY match the title it has in the store.

Now a comment and some questions.

Comment: It would be nice, in the album art views, if you could suppress the display of album art for tracks with "Unknown Album." I have a lot of single tracks, live tracks, etc. that don't have album titles and will never have album art, and they REALLY clutter up what would otherwise be some really cool display modes in iTunes.

Question 1: If I wanted to manually create album art (scan covers) for CDs that aren't in the iTunes store, what's the appropriate size and resolution for the art? This information is surprisingly hard to pull out of Google.

Question 2: I copy tracks to my iPod manually, rather than auto-sync it. What's the best way for me to get album art onto the iPod? Am I going to have to delete everything from the iPod and re-copy the album-art-added tracks to the iPod?

JRjr

[porieux]

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[porieux]

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[brokenjago]

Originally Posted by vapspwi

Question 1: If I wanted to manually create album art (scan covers) for CDs that aren't in the iTunes store, what's the appropriate size and resolution for the art? This information is surprisingly hard to pull out of Google.

Question 2: I copy tracks to my iPod manually, rather than auto-sync it. What's the best way for me to get album art onto the iPod? Am I going to have to delete everything from the iPod and re-copy the album-art-added tracks to the iPod?

1) It can be as big or as small as you'd like. The album downloaded from iTunes varies in size dramatically.

2. Yes, you're going to have to resync with the new songs. The actual picture is added to the file itself, so yeah.

[vapspwi]

Originally Posted by brokenjago

1) It can be as big or as small as you'd like. The album downloaded from iTunes varies in size dramatically.

2. Yes, you're going to have to resync with the new songs. The actual picture is added to the file itself, so yeah.

Thanks for the info. Some followups:

1. I snagged an album cover from Amazon at random, and it didn't completely fill the art box in the "album list view." Apparently there's SOME minimum size that's required to get it to fill the box. Should be easy to figure out with some trial and error, but I figured it was worth asking.

2. It seems like maybe there are two ways the album art is associated now - the stuff that comes down from iTunes is apparently stored in an album art folder and, maybe, only linked to the songs via a database field or metadata (rather than actually added to the file). Art I add to the songs manually is, I guess, still stored in the individual files. I wouldn't swear to this, as I've only just started learning about the album art feature, but that's what it looks like from a brief inspection.

JRjr

[JMII]

Originally Posted by vapspwi

1. It appears that the album art server is getting hammered. I verified that certain albums were present in the iTunes Store, and sometimes had to manually select "get album art" for that album 10-20 times before it would finally connect and download.

I'm pretty sure this is the case, I've reconnected several more times are sure enough now nearly 90% of my albums have art now Each time I run the process it gets a little faster and a few more titles fill in. The CoverFlow feature is great, but only if you have the album art!

[brokenjago]

1. I snagged an album cover from Amazon at random, and it didn't completely fill the art box in the "album list view." Apparently there's SOME minimum size that's required to get it to fill the box. Should be easy to figure out with some trial and error, but I figured it was worth asking.

2. It seems like maybe there are two ways the album art is associated now - the stuff that comes down from iTunes is apparently stored in an album art folder and, maybe, only linked to the songs via a database field or metadata (rather than actually added to the file). Art I add to the songs manually is, I guess, still stored in the individual files. I wouldn't swear to this, as I've only just started learning about the album art feature, but that's what it looks like from a brief inspection.

1. I know what you mean, but I don't know what the minimum size is .

2. After doing more research, it seems you're right The album art downloaded from iTunes is put into a separate database file, while the album art you drag and drop from wherever is actually tacked onto the file. Interesting. I wonder if the database album art is transferred to an iPod so you can view the album art when you play the song? Can anyone confirm/deny this?

[atlcane]

I take back my original statement which I originally made. I ran the find album art a few times and it filled almost everything in. I have found a few areas where it has given me incorrect album art.

[fisherKing]

sorta on topic...

i just updated my itunes library, i now have art for everything (about 2000 songs).
mostly amazon art widget, and google images.

but...
whats the value of viewing cd covers on the nano?
maybe if it was a full-screen image, altho....who stares at their nano screen while listening to music? maybe when playing games, of course.

i tried showing images on the nano, but just killed it.

just my rant-for-the day...

[vapspwi]

Originally Posted by brokenjago

2. After doing more research, it seems you're right The album art downloaded from iTunes is put into a separate database file, while the album art you drag and drop from wherever is actually tacked onto the file. Interesting. I wonder if the database album art is transferred to an iPod so you can view the album art when you play the song? Can anyone confirm/deny this?

Yeah. If you drag albums with auto-added album art over to the iPod, the album art comes with it. It takes a few seconds for the album art to show up when you first pick a song from the album, though.

The whole album art thing seems a little bit kludgey at this point. I wish you could pick the appropriate art from iTunes for the albums if you wanted to, instead of having it guess for you, and I wish you could manually add art in the same way the auto-added art gets added (to avoid duplicating the album art in every track from the album).

JRjr

[brokenjago]

Originally Posted by vapspwi

I wish you could manually add art in the same way the auto-added art gets added (to avoid duplicating the album art in every track from the album).

You can. You simply have to select all the songs in an album, then click "Get Info" and then put the album art in the provided area.

It's lame you can't do it from the main iTunes window, but whatever.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by brokenjago

You can. You simply have to select all the songs in an album, then click "Get Info" and then put the album art in the provided area.

It's lame you can't do it from the main iTunes window, but whatever.

Uh....you can do that in the main iTunes window, but I think that vapspwi was talking about being able to manually add art so that it appeared just once in the Album Artwork folder, and not attached to every file in the album. I agree, it would be nice.

[brokenjago]

You can't do it from the main iTunes window in iTunes 7 anymore. At least not on my iTunes.

Stupid. (As in, that's a stupid thing, not you're stupid)

[G0Ducks]

I agree... Works great here, and when I open iTunes again, it can get a few more.
Be patient people! We are getting something really really awesome for free here... iTunes AND album art

Originally Posted by JamesKass

I'm guessing it's being hammered... each time I re-run it, it grabs a few more.

[porieux]

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[brokenjago]

To be honest, iTunes 7, for all it's cool & nifty features, is starting to piss me off.

There are several reasons.

First of all, the new GUI. Jesus! It's not that it's bad, it's just that Apple, for all their wonderful software expertise, can't seem to make up their freaking mind. Stop breaking consistency!!

Second of all, at least on my system, this thing has either quadrupled it's memory usage or has a really bad memory leak. If I run it for about an hour it ends up using 215 MB (!!!!) of memory!

Thirdly, at least on Windows, whenever I start it up, if it doesn't detect an iTunes folder in the root of the start menu, it puts one there and an iTunes Desktop icon on the Desktop. That is completely ridiculous!! It's something I'd expect spyware or some shitty program like RealPlayer to do. (for the record I have my iTunes folder in a subfolder named "Media Players" to unclutter my start menu.)

Fourthly, the performance has totally tanked on this version.

Fifthly (is that even a word? ,) there is so much polish missing from this product it seems like some Microsoft 1.0 version product. Seriously.

And last (at least for now,) but not least, I can't play a movie and run iTunes at the same time without having the music stutter badly, or, for that matter, even stres the computer any small amount or the music will stutter.

I didn't mind the occasional problems with 6.0h, but seriously, this release is plauged badly with bugs and has some features with I think are total bullshit. I'm seriously considering dumping it, despite it treating me quite well since version 4.6...

Maybe it's better on Mac OS X. I'll find out when I get my Mac Pro

Bad form Apple, bad form.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by brokenjago

Second of all, at least on my system, this thing has either quadrupled it's memory usage or has a really bad memory leak. If I run it for about an hour it ends up using 215 MB (!!!!) of memory!

Fourthly, the performance has totally tanked on this version.

If you are having iTunes trawl through your library to download album art, it will chew up memory and decrease performance. Is this what is happening? If so, it's normal. It will stop when iTunes stops looking for album art.

My iTunes has been open for several hours and is using ~45 MB of RAM. And oh so Snappy™.

[brokenjago]

Hm. This may be the case. I haven't started downloading album art again yet and it seems to be stable at about 60MB of RAM. (Still a good 15 MB or so more than 6, but I'll let it go since I'm assuming things like CoverFlow etc take up some room too.)

Edit: Damn, nevermind. It's gone up to 115MB

[vapspwi]

Originally Posted by brokenjago

Second of all, at least on my system, this thing has either quadrupled it's memory usage or has a really bad memory leak. If I run it for about an hour it ends up using 215 MB (!!!!) of memory!

Thirdly, at least on Windows, whenever I start it up, if it doesn't detect an iTunes folder in the root of the start menu, it puts one there and an iTunes Desktop icon on the Desktop. That is completely ridiculous!! It's something I'd expect spyware or some shitty program like RealPlayer to do. (for the record I have my iTunes folder in a subfolder named "Media Players" to unclutter my start menu.)

Fourthly, the performance has totally tanked on this version.

Fifthly (is that even a word? ,) there is so much polish missing from this product it seems like some Microsoft 1.0 version product. Seriously.

Agreed - my primary iTunes machine is an XP box (I recently got a MacBook, and haven't even updated iTunes on it yet) and I've noticed most of the stuff you talk about above.

I haven't checked the memory usage, but the performance seems a bit worse than the previous version, which wasn't exactly snappy. Startup is particularly slow. (And this is after it's done updating for gapless and trawling for album art, too.) Transferring songs to the iPod is a bit slower, too - it does the copy, then spends a couple of seconds "updating iPod - do not disconnect" for some reason.

The lack of polish on some of the new features is a bit disturbing. It kind of seems like they rushed to cram a bunch of new stuff in and get it out for the big release announcement. Hopefully they're at least going to fix it all in point releases.

I, too, have noticed the REALLY ANNOYING bug that occurs if you move the folder out of the root of the Windows Start menu. Like you, I move the iTunes folder into a subfolder to declutter the Start menu. This bug really pisses me off - kinda like the un-get-rid-able "qttask" that still rears its head occasionally...

JRjr

[brokenjago]

I highly doubt it's a "bug". You can't accidentally program it to add start menu icons if they're not there already...