Cover art is added to iTunes in one of several ways. As I am ripping entire albums, I find it easiest to select all the tracks for an album and past them in the album art window on the bottom left corner of the iTunes Window. Here is my entire workflow:
- Once the CD is inserted and recognized by iTunes I check the tracks for accuracy and correct any errors. Artists with proper names are changed to the Last, First MI format and groups with names that start with A or An are corrected for proper sorting; iTunes handles the article the properly but not others. Genre/style information is checked against the AMG database.
- After starting the import process I begin adding information in my Music Collector database except for track links and album art.
- In Canvas X I acquire and process the album art. After scanning at 300 ppi the image I process the image by removing dust and scratches that are picked up by the scanner and finalize any color correction.
- The size of the image is changed to 300 x 300 pixels after image editing is completed for typical jewel case album art or 300 x 264 for more rectangular CD cases. I then resample the image, which is at >300 ppi after the size modification, and resample it at 72 ppi. The new image is resized to 144 ppiscaled to 50%and saved as a JPEG image at 100% image quality. I save the cover images in the same folder as the music files for the corresponding album/single.
- Once iTunes completes the import process, I add the track information in Music Collector as well as link the tracks in the database to the iTunes tracks now on the hard drive. The album art, which is stored in the same directory as the song files, is also added to the database.
- The 144 ppi image in Canvas is copied to the clipboard and pasted into the album art field in iTunes for the corresponding album. I typically do this by selecting all of the tracks for the album/single that was just ripped then right clicking on the album art window in the lower left corner of the iTunes window to paste the image. I have read that this method of adding album art in iTunes 7 is broken. The other option is to go to the Info dialog for the selected tracks and paste the album art into the album art field.
The reason I chose a 300 x 300 pixel size was because much of the album art that Music Collector gathers when it imports CD data were of that size. Sampled at 72 ppi, this means that images should scale clearly up to about 4+ inches square without losing clarity; at the native resolution the album art is about 2 x 2 in. That is more than enough resolution for the thumbnail sizes used in Music Collector (approx. 2 x 2 in.), iTunes (approx. 2 x 2 in; 1 x 1 in. as scaled by me) and the iPod, which has a much smaller image.
The album art in CoverFlow is a little over 3 x 3 in., so my images, which were sampled at a bit depth that allows them to scale up to 4 x 4 before pixelating, should appear relatively sharp, but they do not. My album art appears blurry and pixilated despite its native 144 ppi resolution, which makes we wonder if previous versions of iTunes resample the images to a lower resolution.
ADDENDUMI just copied an image from iTunes and pasted it into Canvas. It was converted by iTunes from the original 144 ppi JPEG to a PICT metaobject. When I converted the item back into an image, it was a 150 x 150 pixel image at 72 ppi instead of 144 ppi. That explains the low quality of the scaled-up images in CoverFlow. I would guess that the resampling procedure was implemented to make images a small as possible as color iPods IMPORT the images along with songs making the music files that much larger.
Hopefully, iTunes 7 would no longer do this, for obvious reasons, but alas, when I re-imported album art for an album it was still converted to a low resolution image. Image rescaling should be a part of the export process for iPod syncing, but images placed into iTunes should be left alone unless they are exceedingly large. Even at the size that my images are set, the average image size of 56K comes to only 54.7 MB per 1000 songs. Given 1000 average length songs at 128 Kbps, by Apple math is 3.66 GB, that is 1.5% of extra space required for album art for 150 x 150 pixel images at 144 ppi with JPEG compression.
“Cannot run out of time. There is infinite time. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.”
2.3GHz Power Mac G5/4GB/500GB HDD/OS X 10.4.11/30-inch ACD,
60GB iPod (Color)
