How can I automatically get album covers for music on my ipod?

November 17, 2005 4:52 PM

So I just got a video ipod, and I have about 50 gigs of music on my computer. I need an automated way to get album covers for some or most of these mp3s onto my ipod.

I'm on a PC FYI. itunes isn't cutting it, there's no way I'm searching for all 1,000+ albums on amazon and dragging them into itunes. I downloaded MediaMonkey on the recommendation of a friend, and it seems to be fetching album covers for the music in my library, but I can't figure out how to transfer the images to the ipod. What's the best solution?

posted by youthenrage to computers & internet (10 comments total)

this thread has suggestions
posted by clarahamster at 4:56 PM on November 17, 2005

MediaMonkey should do everything you need.

The trick, however, is to "tag" the mp3s with the album art. The next trick is to enable album art display on the iPod.

You shouldn't need anything else, and should be all set!
posted by twiggy at 5:15 PM on November 17, 2005

just a thought:

try to optimize the pictures as much as possible because they take up space on your iPod. i'm assuming you have a 60GB iPod, but remember you actually only have 55.6 GB of space.

personally, i don't see the point of album art unless you have space to burn, and i know i don't. it sound like you don't either.
posted by keswick at 5:24 PM on November 17, 2005

I use iTunes Art Importer a free program that searches the Amazon database for album covers. I've found it to successfully find the artwok I need about 99.9% of the time.

You simply open iTunes and iTunes Art Importer. Select the songs you want to find artwork for in iTunes (easiest to do album at a time), hit the search button and you get a list of possible matches. Select the one you want and hit the import button and voilla the artwork is added to the selected songs.
posted by mule at 5:38 PM on November 17, 2005

I used the iTunes Art Importer that mule recommends, but be aware that it requires Microsoft Net Framework 1.1 -- which isn't common, I don't think.

If you've got something that can work, then stick with it, like twiggy said.
posted by booksandlibretti at 5:54 PM on November 17, 2005

then stick with it, like twiggy said.

this gives me the giggles, for some reason.

additionally: to optimize album art for your iPod, turn off Album Art in the iPod preferences, and then turn it back on. this should also speed up the UI - large album covers tend to make it sluggish.
posted by heeeraldo at 6:04 PM on November 17, 2005

FWIW, I've been in the midst of a similar undertaking, but on a Mac. While there are several applications that will assist in this, I've found that they're hit-or-miss with album art, especially with compilations (even when flagged as such). So I've actually wound up doing this manually, using a combination of images.google.com and a site that gathers covers from several different countries' Amazons. This gives me the option of choosing which image I want to use.

Handy tip if you do this: if you have the album selected in the iTunes library browser, you can drag the image directly from the web browser into the "selected track" cover-art pane and it will apply it to all the tracks (works on the Mac, anyhow).

As to size--I think most of the images I've been dredging up have been 30 KB or less. Most of my MP3s are 3 MB and up. So the cover art adds 1% or less to the file size.
posted by adamrice at 7:00 PM on November 17, 2005

...you can drag the image directly from the web browser into the "selected track" cover-art pane and it will apply it to all the tracks (works on the Mac, anyhow).

Works on the PC, too.
posted by S.C. at 7:15 PM on November 17, 2005

I have no personal experience with this program, but iArt is from the same makers of iStory Creator, which is pretty cool.
posted by BigBrownBear at 4:53 AM on November 18, 2005

There's a Konfabulator plugin called "iTunes Companion" that does an amazon image lookup for whatever's playing...
posted by omnidrew at 10:31 AM on November 18, 2005