Filed under: Odds and ends, iTunes
High quality album art (from Apple)
With Apple emphasizing Cover Flow more and more in the new iPods, etc., the need for good quality album art is ever increasing. I know iTunes is supposed to grab art for songs that are in your library and the iTunes Store, but in my experience it hasn't worked that well.
Fortunately, Josh Powell has cooked up a nice little site called Josh's iTunes Album Art Grabber that lets you search the iTunes album art repository and download high quality jpgs from Apple's servers. In my brief test (with Springsteen albums), most of the cover art came back as 600 x 600px. However, some albums featured art up to 1425 x 1425 or higher.
The search engine is rather strict ("White Stripes" returned nothing, it had to be "The White Stripes"), but this looks like an excellent resource for filling in holes in your collection.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
H8TR said 6:19PM on 9-14-2007
Can't seem to find covers for new albums like Curtis and Graduation.
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Jerm said 6:27PM on 9-14-2007
What ever happened to ctrl+clicking/right clicking on a song and choosing "Get Album Artwork"?
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Jon Stieglitz said 7:03PM on 9-14-2007
goldmine
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Rae Whitlock said 7:04PM on 9-14-2007
@Jerm: "Get Album Artwork" does not retrieve the available high-rez artwork, it seems.
(I did a test with the Innocence Mission's We Walked In Song. The art retrieved w/ "Get Album Artwork" was 600x600 pixels, while the art retrieve Josh's site was 1400x1400.)
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p2d said 7:19PM on 9-14-2007
Is there any app out there that automatically browse my itunes and add the necessary artwork?
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Alexander said 8:02PM on 9-14-2007
I don't understand what problems you guys are having with iTunes and album artwork retrieval. I listen to some obscure shit and iTunes almost always retrieves correct and great album artwork now that their catalog has become really international and expansive.
Get your tags right in the first place?
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Eric said 8:14PM on 9-14-2007
If you had to include "The," does that also mean you would have to use Apple's version of the album name?
In downloaded John Lennon's "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" today, but Apple has it as "John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band (Remastered)," which I promptly changed... would that not work?
(On a side note, the download didn't even include album art for some reason- or else it didn't transfer to my iPod.
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Gareth Burleigh said 8:15PM on 9-14-2007
P2d I don't see any app ever doing what you want because it would have to know every album ever put out, which would take a lot of (impossible) dedication from the programmer.
Alexander maybe your not as obscure as you would like to think you are, I have had to find and add art myself to lots of my iTunes collection, on top of that the point being made is that often iTunes art is very low res.
Gareth
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Judd Volino said 8:24PM on 9-14-2007
Actually, Gareth, there are programs that will go retrieve artwork automatically for those tracks missing it, at least for the Mac. Of course, if they can't find it, they can't find it and they move on.
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(01) said 8:25PM on 9-14-2007
I've always found Amazon w/ a combination of Google image search to be the best way...Of course, this has also led to a corruption of my iTunes album art, rendering my iTunes cover screen-saver useless. Good times.
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Judd Volino said 8:27PM on 9-14-2007
OK, found the link for the artwork downloader:
http://www.fixtunes.com/mac/
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bruckwine said 2:10PM on 9-16-2007
SOund sonly useful if you use exclusively iTunes - I've found Amazon to have the most complete "collection" of album covers so far.
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Alexander said 8:31PM on 9-14-2007
Oh trust me Gareth, especially for a US iTMS account, I listen to some obscure shit.
I think oldies and classical music tend to not be on iTMS and I will say that i have a hard time with album artwork for some oldies.
The album artwork I get from iTMS seems to be good enough quality of the iPhone.
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Gareth Burleigh said 8:41PM on 9-14-2007
Judd are you not just reinforcing what Im saying? "Of course, if they can't find it, they can't find it and they move on."
There is just no way anybody is going to know every piece of music released and have the art for it.
Alexander I don't want to argue Im happy somebody is thinking outside the music box however. I have had a nightmare finding album art for artists like Jandek and the early Melt Banana discs I own, and they are some of the better known "lesser" artists I listen to
Gareth
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Alexander said 8:43PM on 9-14-2007
So it seems like there's a problem here with earlier works from lesser known artists. Amazon!
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Gareth Burleigh said 8:53PM on 9-14-2007
Oh taking the piss, how refreshing
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freq said 11:25PM on 9-14-2007
How many kb do the 1400X 1400 images add to each song file size? times the number of tracks on an album...seems like one album of hi-rez can add at least 1-2MB per album...that could be up 100Mb per 50 10 song albums. While hi-rez would look nice on an AppleTV or monitor, however on my 4GB iPhone every kB counts. 100 Mb is two more albums or a pair of TV shows. I have 200 X 200 images (19k - 32k each) and they look fine on the iPod platform. Too bad iTunes can't store both and automatically select the image that fits the medium.
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mark said 12:57AM on 9-15-2007
actually -- believe it or not -- the best (i.e., highest quality) artwork on the net (aside from apple, of course) is walmart.com. yep, walmart.... better than amazon, and better than google (because walmart's cover art doesn't show up in google searches).
amazon's scans are often not perfectly square, or they're crooked or have random white edges, because they weren't aligned properly.
josh's search tool is fantastic. but if you find yourself needing to grab artwork on the net, look at walmart.com.
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Psycho said 5:11AM on 9-15-2007
why would you want large album art that takes up the already precious space on your ipod
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Psycho said 5:14AM on 9-15-2007
1) Why would you want large album art taking up what is already precious space on your ipod (are you really that vain)
2) if you just name your files correctly i.e. in the same manner as it is in the iTunes store, it will find it
Stop complaining about nothing.....get a life!
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