Adding artwork to multiple songs in iTunes 10
iTunes 10 has a cool new feature that allows you to create a Smart Playlist based on whether or not your music has artwork. To use it, simply set "Has Artwork" to "is false" when creating the playlist. You can (optionally) add "Media Kind: is Music" if you want to avoid seeing podcasts, movies, and other items that don't have artwork.
I recently decided to clean up my iTunes library. This involved taking all of the music out of the iTunes library and only adding back music that I knew I really liked. I was also making sure the metadata was accurate, including the artwork. I had been adding the artwork via TidySongs, but it had been acting a bit unreliably and claiming that iTunes was not responding (the developers tell me there is a new version available for Windows and a new Mac version is due "soon"). So, I started adding artwork manually.
Something very strange has happened that I can't completely explain, so I'll just describe it. I've found songs in my "No Artwork" playlist that had artwork (clearly visible when using Cover Flow), but if I examine the song individually using the inspector, the artwork is indeed missing. I'm not sure how this is happening, but I have noticed a pattern that might give a clue: all of the "phantom" artwork was added by dragging manually to the "Drag Artwork Here" area on the bottom left of the iTunes window while multiple songs from the same album were selected. If I examine the files in the Finder, some of them have the artwork, and some of them don't.
Why is this happening? I have no idea. Frankly it makes no sense, and I suspect that there's a bug in there somewhere. (Or maybe that fortuneteller actually did put a curse on me.) Whatever the reason, there does seem to be a workaround.
- Select all of the songs that you want to apply the artwork to
- Use command+i to call up the inspector
- Drag the artwork to the inspector instead of the "Drag Artwork Here" area
I don't know why, but that method has worked 100% reliably for me without leaving any "stragglers" lacking artwork. It's a bit of a hassle, but that's a trade-off I'll take for something that works better.
Thanks to Guillermo Esteves for drawing my attention to the new iTunes feature.
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iTunes 10 has a cool new feature that allows you to create a Smart Playlist based on whether or not your music has artwork. To use it,...
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I seem to be having trouble running the "embed artwork" script from Doug's Applescripts in iTunes 10. It used to work great in previous versions, but now I get a "parameter error." Any idea why? It's so frustrating since I just re-ripped a bunch of my music and want to store it on my NAS for use with other devices. And I don't want to embed it all (40+ gigs) manually. Any advice would be appreciated!
November 17 2010 at 2:53 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyMatt, I kept running into the "parameter error" with Embed Artwork and I may have found a solution: I sorted by file type, selected all files, and then scrolled through and deselected any file that wasn't MP3, AAC, M4P, etc. I found four different file types in my main Music list that could have caused the problem: .WAVs, PDFs (i.e., "Digital booklets" for albums purchased from iTunes), iTunes LPs, and I think there was a video stuck in there for some reason, too. (Perhaps a bonus track on an iTunes purchase?)
Anyway, I de-selected all of those, and Embed Artwork has been chugging away now for about an hour, instead of timing out after about 5 minutes as it was doing previously. Crossing fingers that this has addressed the issue.
...And it just finished! This time I didn't get a "parameter error," but rather an error that said "File some object wasn't found" (how descriptive!). Off to research that now, but maybe this will help you.
-j.
since I also experienced several disappearing artwork, I now make use of the "Embed Artwork"-script (one of dougscript's large list of itunes applescripts) to force embedding the artwork into the files directly. Available at dougscripts.com.
September 18 2010 at 9:39 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyWhat does it mean, then, when it still won't add the art to the file, even after multiple drag-n-drops, manual drops in 'info', and even adding one-at-a-time in the file's artwork tab? That's been my problem lately, that iTunes not only randomly loses the artwork I once had attached, but won't let me re-add it.
September 17 2010 at 9:10 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyCheck to see if the "Part of a compilation" box is checked. If so, the song will show artwork without it necessarily being embedded in the MP3 file directly.
September 17 2010 at 7:43 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyOK, so does anyone know how to take a track from a 'no artwork' smart playlist that shows artwork and embed that image into the ID3 tag?
I have tried copying the image, but that does not work, so it seems as though i might have to find the artwork all over again (i have a lot of tracks that iTunes can't auto find the artwork for)
thanks
Lee
I believe what you're looking for can be found within one of the many wonderful scripts available at dougscripts.com. Here's a direct link to the script that embeds the artwork: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/2009/09/updated-embed-artwork-v2-0/
Doug's site is awesome, so do yourself a favor and check it out... I have a dozen or more of his scripts installed and love them. (I'm using iTunes 9, and plan to keep it that way).
I have two art "conundrums" myself:
1) .mp3 file thumbnails in the Finder no longer show artwork for me (nor does the artwork appear in the "Get Info" pane, or anywhere else in finder for that matter. I know others are having this issue as well.
2) a decent portion of my iTunes files have 2 of the same image attached as art. I'm not sure how it happened, but unless/until I find something to automate the removal of one of them, I've basically got to go through one-by-one and remove the duplicate art. Annoying, but a small price to pay for a meticulously-organized iTunes library.
I don't think it is a bug it had been in iTunes for awhile now the phantom artwork that is. I have always found that if you add artwork to just one song you will see that artwork in coverflow even though all the other songs in the album don't have the artwork, but it would cause "missing artwork" in other places. So like you said I have always just selected the whole album and added artwork that way.
September 17 2010 at 4:29 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI have noticed a bug when applying artwork that has caught me several times. If you are playing one of the tracks that you are attempting to apply artwork to it will stop at the playing track. So for instance if you have 20 tracks selected and you are playing track 11, the first 10 tracks will get the artwork but it will stop and not apply it to tracks 11-20.
September 17 2010 at 4:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI agree that I've seen the "has artwork" feature in smart playlists prior to 10. And I'll restate what Drew has said:
iTunes creates a separate file for album artwork, not following the convention of adding actual image information to an mp3. However, based on the description of the problem, iTunes doesn't search it's own database of artwork, but instead searches for the presence of an image file in the mp3. It seems to me to be a serious inconsistency in iTunes in that it looks for artwork in a place that it does not consistently store the artwork. There are ways to get iTunes to add album artwork to the actual mp3, but it is not the default action in some situations, hence the confusion.
It's more of a problem if you ever move your files out of iTunes or add them manually to a different iTunes library. If you keep everything in iTunes and listen to them on your i[AppleDevice] then your artwork should display properly even if album art is not in every single file on an album. The problem, as you noticed, is that iTunes won't use "has artwork" to mean, "iTunes knows what art to display," and instead is uses "has artwork" to mean, "There is an image file embedded in this file."
It's confusing and a little sloppy on iTunes' part. It's not new, but it is worth bringing up to people unaware of the issue.
I don't get the point of this article.
This has been the way to do it in iTunes for what seems like ever, nothing changed about this feature in iTunes 10.
When you drag artwork to the Drag Artwork Here box iTunes merely copies the image into an album artwork folder and associates it with the album.
When you drag artwork into the inspector it actually writes the artwork into the individual mp3 or aac files, so it appears with each track.
Interesting I did not know this, makes sense now. So how does it treat the artwork if you click on automatically get artwork in the advanced section?
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