iTunes 7: cover art tidbits

Clearly I am not seeing what many other commentators are. I have a 30GB ipod and itunes 7. I can download the albumart to my PC but its nownere to be seen on the ipod. Is this itunes 7 or just me?

I've written a simple application to extract the album art from the .itc files, you can find it here:

http://blog.skuldtek.com/2006/09/16/albumartworkxtractor-extract-album-artwork-from-itunes-7/

what a load of tosh this itunes 7 is, its fecked up all my album artwork and wont show any, gonna change back to 6.

Yes, the album images are definitely not embedded in the MP3's themselves. The thing that bothers me is that the "ITunes Music folder location" set in Preferences | Advanced | General" is not obeyed when the album art is imported, at least not on Windows. I moved my son's MP3 collection to a new disk drive, so that the main drive was free for other stuff. With him importing the album art, all art was put back on the original drive, in "My MusiciTunesAlbum Artwork". Feh. Only 50 Megs, but still, now the art is on a different drive than the music itself.

I found that MUCH of my music didn't have cover art. I had to download a lot of my own cover art. This wasn't much of an issue, it was something that I was always 'going' to do, but this just spurred me to actually do it.
Someone said that singles appear with duplicate cover art, I have had this problem, but I rectified it by changing something in the IDv3 tag and they then seemed to group themselves.
Yeah, sorting through the MANY random tracks I have it kinda annoying - but hey, these are all tips which can be updated in future versions.

Not happy about it not embedding. I'm glad that I've got my library track tagged wtih album art already. Not embedding the art into the MP3 is worthless. But I'll assume this is to limit abuse of their album art database. Anyway. Amazon, Discogs, Google images and various P2P sites will remain my art sources.

Yes, #31. I've noticed this as well. At least that's how it is on my 4G non-color screen ipod. I am assuming it's also true for 5G and 5.5G iPods. If that's the case, I am shocked at apple.

I guess now we need a script that will take the downloaded art and embeded it into the id3 tags of the songs.

Btw, has anyone noticed that the album art iTunes downloads is 250-500kb each. You add that to the 12-15 songs in an album and you have 3-5mb of space. Not terrible for the mac/pc, but definitely does not help the iPod.

Personally I don't trust anything that is going to go out and automatically grab artwork. I have a lot of obscure artists that would be hard to find the right art for a human. I've been pretty happy with Cover Scout, http://www.equinux.com/us/products/coverscout/index.html . The UI can be a bit crazy sometimes but it works pretty well. Especially with a really large collection. Still not sure if it was worth $20.

I noticed a lot of strange things in iTunes.
First it only download a cover if you don't already have one. I always put a lot of efforts in album covers and, not having a scanner, sometimes was very difficult for me to find old album ones. So I put very small or ugly ones. A natural evolution was to try to find better ones with iTunes.
But the only way I found is: delete (backup) old cover, make iTunes search one. Then, if it founds it, see if it's better than previous. if not I've to delete it and put back old one. It would have been better if it just added it so I was able to decide which one to keep.
Second problem I cannot add a cover to multiple songs as I was used before (select them and drop cover to lower left box). Only way is to do it for every file or open info and drag them to the box there.
Third problem is that not always iTunes download the same cover you see on the store. I can't remember the album, I think it was one of Patty Smith but I'm not sure. I went to the store to check if there was (faster check before delete old cover, and try download) and there was. Surely better quality than mine. So I deleted old one and made iTunes download it. But the one arrived was very low quality and different from Store ones (even colors were worse, something pink/light red instead of full red). This was very strange. Does iTunes download covers from national (mine is italy) store or from somewhere else? And if there are different versions of album (usa, uk version or so on)?
I read a thread on another site where they discovered that covers downloaded by iTunes are not stored inside the music file but in an iTunes dir, so be warned. if you'll move your music to another computer you'll loose the cover. unless you go to lower left cover box, right click and select "copy", remove the downloaded cover with menu command and r-click again on box and choose "paste".
Hope these info were useful.

A feature I always wanted is to see the album covers in order of release date. I notice that Apple put this in the new release. Thanx. When albums are of the same release year, then you will get it in alphabetical order