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.
[via Digg]
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Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
Kevin Vahlbusch said 5:33AM on 9-15-2007
If you dont get all your music from the iTMS and you have a very large library (my is over 60GB) it is a daunting task to try name every track/album in the exact same format as the iTMS so that you can get the artwork. So I have a lot of blanks, but I hate coverflow so it does not matter to me.
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lee webb said 6:05AM on 9-15-2007
To Mark #17 I tried walmart on your advice and the 2 covers that I looked weren't great at all. One had a large white border around it and the other had a thin white line at the top.
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pscs said 8:46AM on 9-16-2007
thanks! this is great stuff!
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Simon Arch said 8:19PM on 9-15-2007
@Psycho: "Why would you want large album art taking up what is already precious space on your ipod (are you really that vain)"
Vain? No. I just like having the album art. What do you care how I use my computer, music and iPod?
YOU get a life!
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LoganT said 8:20AM on 9-16-2007
Use this if when you search it doesn't show up.
http://www.thejosher.net/iTunes/methodtwo.php
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Keno.White said 1:00AM on 9-17-2007
My iPod touch screen does NOT look like the one pictured above! You can actually see details in the black feathers on that picture, while on mine all the black things (feathers, reflection, background) would be a shimmery, solid black mass.
Grrr. This upsets me because I'm returning my touch, and all I wanted was for the display to look like THAT, above. Instead, it looks like it's from a circa 1994 laptop computer with a passive matrix display.
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Harbinger said 11:04AM on 9-17-2007
Does the new iTunes method for retrieving artwork even embed the artwork? I thought that's what the new artwork folder in the iTunes Music folder was for? I prefer to embed the graphic into the file so I know all my devices will render out the artwork. I believe the Apple devices use a single graphic to save space, using the entries in that iTunes artwork folder.
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Adrian said 10:53AM on 9-30-2007
You can also try http://www.AllCDCovers.com
A community driven website offering free high quality album art for non commercial use. All the CD and DVD covers are uploaded, approved and ranked by the users.
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