Section 83. Automatically Download Album Art

83. Automatically Download Album Art

Before You Begin	See Also
Add Album Art to Songs	Add a Third-Party Visualizer

As you learned in Add Album Art to Songs, iTunes lets you add imagessuch as scanned pictures from CD coversto all your audio files so that you can look at the original album art from their CDs, whether you're using iTunes or an iPod with a color screen. As you might know, music that you purchase from the iTunes Music Store already has the appropriate album art built into the music files. However, what iTunes does not provide is the ability to automatically search the Internet and fetch album art for music that you import from CDs. Appropriate album art for any of your CDs can be found at Amazon.com, Google, and many other sites, ready to be downloaded and added manually to your songs. But wouldn't it be nice if you could skip that step entirely and add album art with nothing more than a click or two?

This is a job for the third-party software development community. Many small applications exist that have been written for iTunes on both Windows and the Mac, intended to support exactly this feature. Reading in the artists and albums from your iTunes Library and searching likely locations on the web for appropriate album art, you can then embed into your songs with a single click.

One good site to check for such programs is VersionTracker (http://www.versiontracker.com), which searches shareware and freeware for both Windows and the Mac. A search using terms such as itunes album art turns up many well-reviewed programs for both platforms. This task will focus on CoverScout for the Mac and iArt for Windows, both of which are shareware programs whose full features you can unlock for a nominal fee.

Automatically Download Album Art

Download an Appropriate Album Art Finder Program

If you're a Windows user, go to http://www.ipodsoft.com/index.php?/software/iart to find the download page for the iArt program. iArt is shareware and costs $10 for registration, without which only a limited number of album cover retrievals is possible.

Mac users might like CoverScout, which you can find at http://www.wuffwuffware.com/products/CoverScout.html. This program is shareware, with an $8 registration fee. (Without this registration, you can search for album art for only the first 10 albums in your iTunes Library.)

Install the Program

After the program is downloaded to your computer, follow the included instructions for installing it.

CoverScout, like most Mac applications, comes packaged in a disk image. Install the program by dragging the CoverScout icon from the disk image window to your Applications folder.

iArt, like other Windows-based album art finder programs, requires that you install the .NET framework, available as a free download from Microsoft. (iArt's installer program automatically downloads and installs .NET for you.)

Search for Album Art

Both applications discussed here work in much the same way. When you run the album art finder program, it searches your iTunes Library for a listing of artists and albums that don't already have album art. Select one of these album entries that doesn't have art in the tracks already. (CoverScout uses an ! icon to show tracks and albums that don't have artwork, and iArt automatically moves through albums one by one that so you can either save the album art it locates or skip the album).

Use the program's built-in facility to search selected sites for appropriate album art. Both CoverScout and iArt allow you to search Amazon.com, Google, and the iTunes Music Store. In CoverScout, use the buttons in the toolbar to choose a source to browse for album art, and then click Get Artwork to perform the search. In iArt, select the Automatic Internet Art Retriever option, choose a searching source from the drop-down menu, and then click Next to begin searching the selected source for art for each album in turn.

Add Album Art to Selected Tracks

If the program finds album art, it's a matter of a single click to add it to the selected tracks. In CoverScout, use the Set button in the toolbar to apply the images to the selected album; in iArt, use the Save Result Next button to apply the image and move on to the next album.

As you continue using CoverScout, you can refresh the list of albums to show only those entries that haven't yet had artwork applied, repeating the process until you've finished adding artwork to all the albums in your collection. iArt continues processing your albums until you've added album art to all your albums or you've skipped them using the Skip Album button.