Apple recently launched iTunes Match, a service that lets you store your entire music collection (including music you’ve imported from CDs or downloaded elsewhere) in iCloud. It turns out however, you can also use this service to get album artwork for those songs in your library that don’t have artwork.

Part of what iTunes Match does is match the songs in your library with those that are on the iTunes Store. Once the matching is done, you can download a copy of these songs from iCloud anytime. As an added bonus, when downloading these songs back from iCloud, you will always receive a high quality (256kbps) version of your songs including the album artwork!

So, if you have a bunch of songs that are missing album artwork and are also on the iTunes Store, you can sign up for iTunes Match and once it’s done it’s thing, you can delete those songs that are missing artwork and download them from iCloud.  The downloaded version will not only have album artwork  may well be of higher quality (256kbps) than what you had previously.

If you need some more information on how you can easily upgrade your songs with iTunes Match, the folks at Macworld have a nice how to on upgrading your tracks.

Note however, that the copy you download from iCloud will only have album artwork if it’s a song that’s in the iTunes Store.  If you have a lot of songs without artwork that are not in the iTunes Store, your best option would be Rinse.  In addition to finding the album artwork for your songs, you can also use Rinse to remove duplicates from your iTunes library and fixed misspelled songs.  You can try it for free.

Just how do you get album artwork for iTunes? In this article, I outline the different ways to do just this!

The number 1 way to get album artwork for iTunes is to use an automated software like Rinse that does all the hard work for you in no time at all. It’s fast, easy and works even if your songs don’t have the correct titles, artist and album names. In fact, Rinse will even correct the song information for you if you need it to. If you have many songs with missing album artwork, this is definitely the method I recommend to get album artwork for iTunes. You can download a trial copy here:

Rinse should work for you regardless of the size of your iTunes library. If you’re after a free way to get album artwork for iTunes, there are other options. You’ll just need to be prepared to invest some of your time to do some repetitive work.

If your iTunes library has correct song information, you should be able to just use the built-in tool to get album artwork for iTunes. I go into more detail on this in my article on album art finder.

If your iTunes library does not have the correct song information for your tracks however, the work gets quite a bit harder. You’ll need to manually search for the album artwork image files on the internet, crop them to get rid of un-necessary borders and load them into iTunes for each track or album. As before, I have another article with more details on how to get album artwork for iTunes using this manual technique.

Whichever method you choose, I’m sure you’ll have a more enjoyable time browsing your iTunes library, be it on your computer, iPhone, iPod or even Apple TV.

Get Album Artwork for iTunes with Rinse

Another way you can improve your iTunes library – besides adding album artwork – is to delete any duplicate songs you may have. Duplicate songs in iTunes are very common, they may be:

1. copies of the same song from different albums,
2. copies of the same song from different compilations.
3. or even different re-mixes of the same song.

The most efficient way to delete duplicates in iTunes is to use Rinse’s Fix Duplicates tool. It puts you in control of how to find duplicates and what to do about them. It lets you decide:

• whether to keep or delete versions of the same song if they are from different albums
• whether to keep the higher quality/bitrate or the longer length version)

Options for fixing duplicates

It also gives you a choice of how to deal with the duplicates. You can either delete them straightaway or add ‘duplicate’ to their name to help you easily identify them later should you want to delete them.

Perhaps most useful of all though, the Fix Duplicates tool has a simulator mode, that’ll show you exactly what actions would be taken if you went ahead with the duplicates fix.

Unlike the display duplicates feature built into iTunes which I will talk about in the next post, the Rinse Fix Duplicates feature will find duplicates even if they have misspelt names.

Finding and removing those duplicate songs that you no longer want in your iTunes library not only helps you save some hard drive space but it also makes your iTunes experience a lot more enjoyable. Without duplicate songs, your library is easier to browse through and you won’t ever have the same song play twice or more in a row, unless of course you want to and have turned on repeat mode.

Try Rinse to easily delete duplicates from your iTunes library the way you want it

Love Your Music

If you’re considering purchasing a copy of Rinse to sort out your iTunes Album Artwork, duplicate songs or song metadata, they currently have a Valentine’s discount on. Just click through to Rinse and use the coupon code LOVEMUSIC when checking out to get $5 off.

Use the coupon code LOVEMUSIC for $5 off your order

Discount valid until February 15th 2011.

If you have tried the get album art feature discussed in the last post, and you are still left with a few songs that still do not have album artwork, this post will explain how you can add the missing artwork to these songs.

Before I go into the details however, please note that this is a manual method and can be very tedious if you have still have a lot of songs left that do not have album artwork.  A more appropriate solution in that case would be to use an automated software solution like Rinse which is discussed in a previous post.  Rinse will successfully add iTunes album artwork to your songs regardless of whether the songs have the correct artist/track names or not.  In fact, Rinse will even update your songs with the correct artist, track and album names if you don’t have them or if what you have happens to be incorrect.  It does this by anaylsing the music itself rather than just looking at the file names.  By doing so, it knows which song is which even if the song has a name like Track 01 in your iTunes library.

Ok, so if after running iTunes’ Get Album Art feature, you only have a few songs that still don’t have album artwork or have the incorrect artwork, what follows is for you.

You will need:

• access to amazon.com
• a basic image editor that will allow you to crop images (something like MS Paint on Windows or Preview.app on Mac OS)
• lots of patience

Ok, so first, identify the song that’s missing album artwork or that has the wrong album artwork in iTunes.  As an example, let’s say you have Bob Dylan’s Beyond the Horizon in your iTunes library but it’s missing the album artwork.

Step 1

Search for Beyond the Horizon Bob Dylan on amazon.com.

Step 2

In the search results, simply pick the one that’s closest to the album or song you have in your iTunes Library, click on it, then, click on See larger image.

This will bring up a higher resolution copy of the album artwork:

Step 3

Right click on the larger image and click Save image as or simply click on it and drag it to your desktop. Hurrah! You now have a copy of the image on your computer.  Now, let’s tidy it up a little bit and get it into iTunes as album artwork.

Step 4

You’ll notice that a lot (if not all!) of the album artwork that’s on amazon have a white border on their sides.  To keep it clean and tidy, we’ll remove the borders by using a basic image editor.

If you’re on Windows, the easiest way to do this is with Ms Paint.  If you’re unsure how to crop out the white spaces in the album artwork you downloaded, check out this how-to page.

If you’re on a Mac, you can use the Preview application to do the crop, how-to page here.

Step 5

Ok, now that you’ve got rid of the white space/border, find the song in iTunes, right click on it and click on Get Info.

Select the Artwork tab in the window that pops up.

Step 6

Simply drag and drop the image file you downloaded and cropped into the space for the album artwork and click ok.

Yay! You now have album artwork for the song.

Step 7

Simply repeat the above steps for each song that’s missing album artwork or that has the wrong album artwork.

Notes:

• If you’re struggling to get all the album artwork you need due to the tedious nature of this process, remember, there’s an automated software solution that will do this for you much more quickly and without all the effort on your part.
• If you have some songs that you cannot find the album artwork for on amazon.com, try a search on google images or on any online music store instead.

This article will focus on the built in album art finder function within iTunes.  This method of obtaining album artwork is best suited to iTunes libraries that have all tracks correctly labelled with song names, artist names, album names, etc.  If your iTunes library is missing the song details (or has titles like Track 01, Track 02 etc), I would recommend using the automated method which I discussed last week.  That’s because iTunes’ built-in album art finder relies on the song information (artist/album name) in order to identify the correct album artwork; without this information to begin with, iTunes will be unable to find your artwork.

Ok, so if all your song and album names are in order, read on.

First, you will need to identify and select those songs that have no album artwork and/or that have the wrong album artwork.  It is best to only select the ones that are missing album artwork as iTunes has been known to replace the correct artwork for certain songs with artwork for a different album.  If you have a large iTunes library, the best way to do this would be to activate Coverflow mode.

iTunes button to activate Coverflow mode for viewing album artwork

Once in Coverflow mode, scroll through the albums and make a note of each one that’s missing artwork.

Scroll through the album artwork to identify albums with missing artwork

Once you’ve identified all the songs/albums that need album artwork, simply switch back to list view and select them by searching for the album and selecting the tracks.

Search for the songs with missing album artwork in list view

Select the songs with missing album artwork, right click on the selection and click on Get Album Artwork.

Your selection of songs should now have album artwork.  To test it, simply play the song and the artwork should display in the album artwork window:

iTunes album artwork window with album art displayed

If no album art is displayed, it means that iTunes was unable to fetch album art for those songs that you selected.  This could either mean that iTunes does not have the album art for those songs or that the information for the song (song name, album name, etc) in iTunes is incorrect or missing.

If iTunes is unable to find album artwork for lots of your songs, I would recommend using Rinse to automatically download the artwork.  This is generally a more successful method because it identifies album artwork based on the song contents itself rather than the song names and album names.  Once Rinse has identified your tracks it will also be able to update the song details to the correct ones.  For more on how this works, check out the Rinse page.

Otherwise, if iTunes has been able to find most of your album artwork using the built in album art finder function we discussed above, well done, you’re on a good way to updating your entire iTunes library with album artwork. If you are still left with a few songs that still do not have album artwork, check back here soon for a new article on how to find album artwork images and manually add them to the songs in your iTunes Library.

Photo by Bobaloo

So, how do you update the songs in your iTunes library so that they display with album artwork in your library – and on your iPod, iPhone, iPad or Apple TV?

iTunes Library with Album Artwork

Well, there are quite a few ways to achieve this, some more time consuming than others.

1. iTunes built-in Get Album Artwork feature
2. Manually adding album artwork image files to each song or album
3. Automatically updating your complete library with album artwork with Rinse.

The best option for you will mostly depend on how many tracks in your iTunes library have missing album artwork and whether your songs have the correct artist, album and song names to begin with.

The first method will work best if your tracks have the correct artist, track and album names in iTunes.  That’s because iTunes relies on this information to identify the correct album artwork to download.

If the tracks in your library don’t all have the correct information for artist, track and album names then you can add iTunes album artwork images to each track or album manually.  You can obtain the album artwork by doing a Google image search or searching for the album on amazon or even by scanning in the CD cover if you have it.  While this method works, I personally found it to be very inconvenient because besides having to spend an enormous amount of time searching for and downloading the files, the album artwork images tend to be of inferior quality – grainy, low resolution, incorrect sizes – compared to what you would get from iTunes.

So, what’s the alternative? Well the automated solution of course! Rinse is a program designed for iTunes that will automatically analyse all the songs in your library and based on the contents of the songs – not the artist, album and song names – will identify the songs using its database and find the iTunes album artwork you need! So even if your library doesn’t have any song information or if the song information is incorrect, Rinse will still be able to identify the song and download the right iTunes album artwork for you.  As a bonus, Rinse will also fix the song details for you! Also, I’ve found the quality of the iTunes album artwork from Rinse to be of much better quality and higher resolution than the album artwork you would find on amazon or by doing a google image search.

Rinse is definitely the method I would recommend in order to update your library with iTunes album artwork, specially if a lot of your music does not have the correct song/artist names etc.  However, if you would still like to use the manual options, check back here soon for more information on the iTunes built-in Get Album Artwork feature and on how to manually add album artwork image files to your iTunes library.

Hi, welcome to itunesalbumartwork.com! Don’t you hate it when you’re in the middle of browsing through your iTunes library and come across songs that don’t have any album artwork? I recently cleaned up my iTunes library and thought I would set up this website to provide you with information and resources to help you do the same with your iTunes library.

If you’re looking to update the songs in your library with iTunes album artwork, I hope you’ll check back here soon for more.  I will also be writing about the issue of multiple copies of the same song in your library and songs with missing artist names, song titles, album names, years, genres etc.

Thanks for reading, I hope you’ll find this site useful.