Getting cover art in to iTunes

May 27, 2005 10:13 AM

I got a fancy-schmancy new iPod. I also have Windows XP and iTunes. Let's say I already had all my music ripped and cover art downloaded, but the music was in .flac files and on a linux box...

Let's further say that I'm enough of a nerd that right now, at home, my computers are busily bulk converting to MP3 and re-tagging the songs.

So now I've got a bunch of album folders. Each folder contains a bunch of mp3s and a jpg of the cover art.

I want to drag these on to iTunes and let it chew away at them for a while, copying stuff to its own library.

OK, FINALLY, THE QUESTION
How can I automatically get the album art in to iTunes? If I just drop a folder on it, it imports the songs but not the image file. It seems I have to go to the album in iTunes, select all the songs, then drag the file on there. This sucks!

Theres some info out there about automatically downloading cover art, but this is mostly for Apples, and not really what I want

posted by Capn to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

If you don't get any answers here, try the forums at iPodLounge, they are often very helpful. If you were on a Mac I bet there would be an AppleScript to do this.
posted by matildaben at 10:25 AM on May 27, 2005

You can actually store the album art image inside the id3v2 tag, and iTunes will recognize that. There's probably a command line program for Linux that will let you do this easily.
posted by zsazsa at 12:15 PM on May 27, 2005

Not a very pleasant solution, but one that might work.
Run TAG as a command line, use a wildcard *.jpg* to put pointers in an unused field that is supported in id3v1, such as "comment". Then synch id3v1 tags with id3v2, and swap the comment field into album art. I would use Tag & Rename, checking off "specify album art as album front" I suppose.

I don't deal with album art, so I've never used those fields. I hope you don't have to try this method.
posted by Jack Karaoke at 12:59 PM on May 27, 2005

iArt does what you're looking for, but they're now charging $10 for the latest version (3.0). iArt 2.0 was freeware, so you might want to check to see if you can still find it online somewhere. I'm pretty sure it grabs the image from the folder and inserts it into the ID3 tag. iTunes Art Importer will import album art from Amazon.
posted by hootch at 9:56 PM on May 30, 2005