[KBeazley]

How do you add a single image as artwork for an entire album (i.e. without having redundant copies for each individual track).

I already know that iTunes has its own artwork system that allows for this, but this is not helpful if the album art is not in their database.


Thanks in advance.

[rab777hp]

Take one of the songs in the album, and set the picture you want as the artwork, you can do this by pressing apple+i while selecting a song

[KBeazley]

You do not seem to understand what I am asking, though perhaps I should have been clearer. See this other forum I posted in, which should hopefully clarify things.

http://discussions.a...ssageID=9052830


Basically, I want to to add my OWN album art to individual albums without embedding it in every single track and wasting a bunch of hard drive space.

[rab777hp]

You do not seem to understand what I am saying, though perhaps I should have been clearer.

Basically, you only need to add whatever picture you want to one track in the album, then iTunes uses that artwork as the artwork for the album, it only gets embedded in one track.

[mdawson]

What you are asking is not possible in iTunes or ant other contemporary music management software. The type of functionality you describe is present in media databases such as Music Collector, Delicious Library, Readerware AW, et al., that are designed for cataloging physical media. As such, those databases organize database records on the album level where the tracks are either just fields within the album record, or more correctly a small set of fields (e.g., track name and length), or links to more complex sub-records that permit more thorough track-level tagging.

iTunes, Windows Media Player, et al., are not media databases and therefore treat each track as an independent record; data is organized on the track level. Hence, iTunes does not recognize albums but instead can group tracks into ?album groupings? based on certain logic. For instance, a set of tracks with the same artist/album artist and title are grouped as an album in the iTunes user interface, but no such album-level record exists in the iTunes database. Therefore, you cannot assign album-level tags.

If you only have artwork embedded in one track then only that track will have artwork. iTunes has long had a default feature that prioritizes the artwork embedded in the first track of an album grouping as the artwork for the album when tracks are shown grouped as albums. That is, if you have varying artwork in the tracks for an album, the artwork for Track 1 will be used in Cover Flow, Grid View, etc. Relying on that behavior can have mixed results.

Therefore, short of having iTunes find the album art, I which case it will be in the Album Artwork database, you must embed the cover art in each track if you expect iTunes to handle album artwork correctly.