iTunes and Album Art
So you've ripped all your cds to mp3, imported them all into iTunes and you've copied all your favorite tunes to your niffty new iPod device ...
You hit the play button on that sexy little device and bliss pipes through your headphones into your deprived ears ...
But what's this, where is my album art? looking at the folders in windows you confirm that you have pain stakingly added album art and "folder.jpg" files to EVERY single one of your 200 odd cds. but iTunes does not pick it up! how annoying!
Turns out that this is due to the differences between how MediaPlayer and iTunes store this artwork. MediaPlayer copies .jpg files into the folder and uses those to display the album art, clever! iTunes actually embeds the artwork inside the ID3 tags of the file, painful!
When the song is playing in iTunes you can simply drag any pic into the player and this will be embedded into the file for next time ... BUT you have to do this for each and every file! oh lord, when you have over 30Gig of music this would take forever.
Luckily for me i stumbled across the cleverest tool ... iCoverArt.
This tool will scan your music folder and automatically assign the artwork that MediaPlayer put there into iTunes. And for those that are missing, you simply source the file yourself and drag the image into iCoverArt and presto; it's now in iTunes.
How nice ...
Now my deprived eyes can see what my ears are listening to.
I'm happy again!