iPod and iTunes Hacks

Work with Album Artwork

Get all of your album artwork into iTunes quickly and easily.

When you buy a CD, you get not just the audio files, but a package consisting also of the album artwork and liner notes (often the lyrics, too)—not to mention something you can hold in your hand, which is a quality sorely lacking in the digital music world. While this hack won’t have you turning over your monitor in your hands like a CD jewel case, it will inject some of that visual appeal into your iTunes collection.

The latest version of iTunes incorporates cover artwork into its interface. If you purchase a song from the iTunes Music Store, this artwork is downloaded for you right along with your AAC tracks. To view the album cover, just click the Show/Hide Song Artwork icon, as shown in Figure 4-21.

Figure 4-21. Viewing album artwork in iTunes

In all likelihood, though, you’ve not repurchased all your CDs as AACs from the iTunes Music Store. You’re more likely to have ripped some portion of your collection to MP3s/AAC files, CD by CD [Hack #55] . While iTunes does gather and fill in the CD metadata for each track/album from the CDDB for you, it doesn’t take the extra step of grabbing the album covers. That, I’m afraid, is left to you.

If you want to go the manual route, visit Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com ...