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.
- iTunes built-in Get Album Artwork feature
- Manually adding album artwork image files to each song or album
- 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.
