iTunes 7.0 Special Report: Artwork issues: How to make album covers portable, problems dragging and dropping

CNET staff

Sept. 2, 2009 12:07 a.m. PT

4 min read

Album artwork download can be slow Note that the album artwork download function may operate more slowly than expected, but will eventually add most artwork for all iTunes Store-listed tracks, including those not purchased from the iTunes store.

How iTunes 7.0 stores artwork/transfers to iPod iTunes 7.0 stores artwork using a different mechanism than iTunes 6.0.x. When the automatic art downloading feature is enabled in iTunes 7.0, the artwork is not stored within the actual MP3, AAC, etc. file. Instead, it is stored in a separate file that is only available to that copy of iTunes.

As noted by MacFixIt reader Remo Del Bello:

"If you use iTunes 7's new 'Get Album Artwork' the artwork will be added to iTunes' new artwork storage, but not to the file. In other words, the artwork isn't added to the file's embedded ID3 tag. It is only tracked via the information in the iTunes Library."

In order to make the artwork portable (so that it will travel with the file to which it is attached, you need to perform a "Get Info" on the desired song, then copy and paste or manually add the desired artwork in the appropriate location.

Meanwhile, MacFixIt reader Scott Rose reports issues with both incorrect art downloads, and an inability to manually remove artwork from some tracks. Scott writes:

"Can't remove artwork from multiple songs in iTunes 7: There is a bug in iTunes 7. Not only have we found that iTunes 7 downloads incorrect album artwork for many of our albums (such as 'Forrest Gump (Disc 1)', but the major bug is that iTunes 7 does not properly remove artwork for multiple songs, like it used to. if you highlight multiple songs all at the same time, and then "Get Info" on them, and then you check the checkbox for artwork (leaving the box blank)... after you click OK, it does NOT remove all the artwork from all the tracks, like it should. This worked just fine in iTunes 6, but does not work in iTunes 7."

Fix for problems deleting artwork from multiple tracks iTunes 7.0 may appear unable to delete artwork from multiple tracks simultaneously.

Note that deleting manually added artwork from multiple tracks works properly, but deleting automatically downloaded artwork from multiple tracks does not work. This is because manually added artwork is stored in a different manner than artwork automatically downloaded by iTunes.

MacFixIt reader Scott Rose offers a workaround for the latter:

"Select the songs, Control click and select Remove artwork. You don't need to use the 'Get Info' box unless it's for manually-added artwork."

Problems dragging and dropping artwork MacFixIt reader Thomas reports that he is unable to drag images directly from some applications into the iTunes 7.0 artwork pane.

Thomas writes:

"With iTunes 6, I could drag and drop album artwork from Photoshop to iTunes (to the cover field in the lower left corner of iTunes). This doesn't work in iTunes 7 anymore."

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