fetching itunes album art in os x

February 24, 2008 8:44 PM

i have a 12,000 track itunes music library in os x. some of the tracks (~10%) have album art with them, but most do not. all tracks are tagged properly, and in theory should all have album art with them. i've tried itunes built in fetcher and many third party programs for adding album art. i can't recall names of programs, but most were very poor and would crash or not work at all. i would like to fetch art all together, because i don't want to go through 12,000 songs track-by-track. any ideas? thanks! -will
posted by willmillar to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Well, it's not totally automated, but art4itunes might help you out.
posted by ISeemToBeAVerb at 9:14 PM on February 24, 2008

Have you tried MPFreaker? I found it to be amazing at scouring for album art. And it also had a propensity to crash. Here's what I found that makes it work: drop small batches of folders on the program (say, artists a-f, then g-m, so on) while its not running, and then leave your computer alone (perhaps do a batch every night). It's a resource hog, it's a bit temperamental, and the drop mode works a lot better than the full-program mode, but it does get the art, and I thought it did an excellent job.
posted by raconteur at 9:25 PM on February 24, 2008

All sorts of automation is in Corripio
posted by filmgeek at 9:44 PM on February 24, 2008

Clutter works fairly well, once you get used to its quirks. You would have to do an album at a time, though, but you can just do them as you listen to music and it's pretty painless.
posted by bink at 9:45 PM on February 24, 2008

which would have been a better post with the link

Fetch Artwork, open source, Fix Tags, Edit Tags & Lyrics
posted by filmgeek at 9:46 PM on February 24, 2008

Mp3Tag can retrieve album art from Discogs and several different Amazon domains. So far it has pulled tags and covers for all but the most obscure albums I own.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 5:51 AM on February 25, 2008