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Has anyone had the experience of iTunes downgrading the quality of album art you added to tracks? I manually added art to all the songs from one album. The album cover was a hi-res file (~2k x 2k) which looked clear and crisp in my browser and when I opened it in Preview, but in Cover Flow in iTunes it was blurry and looked to have been severely downgraded in quality. This doesn't happen with other album art I've added manually (at lower resolutions too). For some reason it seems iTunes just cannot display this one clearly. Any ideas?

This is a very nice piece! One of the benefits of having lots of album art or even completing the album art in iTunes is that these can be used as a fabulous screen saver on the Mac. To set this, just go to the Preference pane.

Album Art Exchange, http://www.albumartexchange.com/, is the first place I go for cover art. They don't have everything, but what they have is of excellent quality.

Ambrose_Chapel, on 09 February 2011 - 08:40 AM, said:

I've never seen this happen.

Ambrose_Chapel, on 09 February 2011 - 08:40 AM, said:

I scanned in most of my art at ~1400x~1400 and have just checked some of my tracks. Some are the original scan size (I saved all the originals) and some have been resized to 1024x1024. I have no idea when this would have occurred.

There's also a script out there that will search for the album art on Google and then you can drag it over. I've had it a few years so I don't remember where I got it but it's handy.

Within the "Artwork" pane of the iTunes information box I sometimes run into a cover file that cannot be deleted. I select the cover but the "delete" button does not light up for selection nor does the delete key work on these selected covers.

Of course, this is annoying when iTunes has sent me the wrong graphic and now the file and song seem "married".

Any ideas on how to arrange a divorce with these stubborn files? Thanks.

j1h15233, on 09 February 2011 - 11:07 AM, said:

You may mean Find Album Artwork with Google, by Brett O'Connor.

Ambrose_Chapel, on 09 February 2011 - 08:40 AM, said:

It could be that the image is *too* big for iTunes to scale down gracefully.

Try opening the image file in Preview, then choosing 'Adjust Size' from the Tools menu. Take it down to say, 600 x 600, save, and add the result to iTunes.

Herein lies the advantage of having an iTunes library that is 100% ripped from my CD collection. I scan the cover of the liner notes for CDs when I rip them. Originally, I was saving the final JPEGs as 300 × 300, but around iTunes 8 or 9 Apple upgraded the maximum image size to 600 × 600 for Cover Flow. I have only recently started creating album images at the higher resolution, as I have noticed that the 300 × 300 images do not seem to be as sharp as they were with older versions of iTunes. I dread having to re-scan 1400+ CD covers, but hey, that is what downtime is for.

Once I get started digitizing my vinyl collection, getting cover art will get more “interesting.” Large format scanners are far too expensive, so I am considering rigging something like the research library at my alma mater had. It would require setting up a camera facing straight down in 4100K lighting setting and photographing the record covers with a high-res camera. I have looked at album artwork online and find the choices to be either of poor quality or too small. It appears that far too many people simply scan or photograph cover art and do absolutely no post processing to clean it up. I have also seen iTunes cover images that look like they were hastily scanned and dumped onto the iTunes Store server. (All of my cover art is scanned at 300 ppi, retouched, color corrected the saved to as a high quality JPEG at the appropriate resolution.)

The music industry in their usual myopia is missing the boat here. As they own the music catalogs, there should be a repository of high-quality, high-resolution cover art from which people can download the imagery or, at the very least, available to online services such as the iTunes Store, Amazon, et al.

As the article mentions, any artwork you add to a track is saved with that track. An album with 20 tracks has the same image saved 20 times.

But not when iTunes finds the artwork. In that case, it saves it one time in a special cache, and links all of the album's tracks to the same file. Unfortunately there is (apparently) no way for ordinary users to save "album level" artwork this way.

One thing I've found is that while lower res artwork is fine for the Now Playing screens in iTunes and iDevices, if you later decide you want to print the artwork on a CD cover you'll wish you had a higher res image.

I have to say that I've found that TuneUp is absolutely horrible (wrong artwork, damages existing correct data, buggy, does stuff without your permission, requires login, etc.) and CoverScout isn't much better. The money you spend on these programs is nothing compared to the incredible amount of your time that they will waste.

It's just amazing that iTunes doesn't just do it automatically when you rip a CD. It has an option to attempt to fetch album artwork, but it only works for music available in the iTunes store and even then it makes lots of mistakes which are hard to undo.

Apple, you have dropped the ball on this one! The current means of importing album art is just broken.

That being said, I have to say that there are some good web sites for cover art. I've found discogs.com to be quite useful, and there are some other decent sites which are easily found on Google.

This post has been edited by blecch: 09 February 2011 - 08:26 PM

blecch, on 09 February 2011 - 08:23 PM, said:

I have to disagree. If you just tell the programs to search for stuff and add artwork without checking (which TuneUp can do, but CoverScout, if I recall, is less willing to make mass changes), you'll get crap. You have to spend the time to check and select each piece of album art. You can't just click a button and expect perfect results.