Tutorial: Album Art for iTunes

Everyone has this problem - you have tracks in your iTunes library that don’t have cover art. Whether the tracks came from some obscure CD that iTunes has never heard of or elsewhere, the problem of missing cover art didn’t used to be a problem. However, once Cover Flow appeared in iTunes, the artwork became more prominent. Then, with the release of iPhone, cover art has become even more important. With Cover Flow possibly coming to iPods soon, it will become an even larger part of our music listening experience.

We’ve covered applications that fetch cover art for you on MacApper, but this solution is unique. It’s free, it requires no application download or registration, and it’s drop-dead simple to use.

The process is simple:

• Use an Applescript to magically create a playlist containing all of your coverless music.
• Export a list of the coverless must.
• Use a free online tool to locate art for all of those tracks.
• Drag the art from Safari into iTunes. You’re done!

The first step is to download the Tracks without Artwork to Playlist script from Doug’s Applescripts. If you don’t already have Doug’s site bookmarked, you should. The script is not guaranteed to be perfect, but it will do a great job of locating the tracks in your library without cover art and placing them into a new playlist called “No Art.” It took about five minutes to run on my MacBook and found that 959 tracks in my library out of 1,962 tracks had no art. Of those tracks, 30 already had artwork, which I had already manually entered by poking around on the web a while back. It was a piece of cake to simply run through the Cover Flow view, find those tracks and delete them from the list.

The second step is to create a text file listing all of the tracks in your No Art playlist. You do that via the Export command in iTunes’s File Menu.

Third, head over to Art4iTunes, the site that is going to do the heavy lifting. It is a totally free service that, in my experience, does exactly what it says it will. You use the simple form there to upload the text file you created in the previous step and - presto! - you get cover art for each album. I would not suggest uploading all 900 of your tracks at once, since the results will span several pages and the process of moving the art into iTunes is the most tedious step. Still, for those tracks too stubborn to get art automatically from iTunes, this is a great alternative, and it’s totally free!