Beautify Your iTunes Library
Now that I have an iPod Touch, I’m much more conscious about the appearance of my iTunes library. Here are a few tricks to make sure your music looks as good as it sounds.
Download Missing Album Artwork from the iTunes
Cover Flow may not be the most useful iTunes view, but it certainly looks awesome. Every track or album that you buy on the iTunes store includes album artwork to make sure it looks great when you flip to it in Cover Flow. But if you’re like most people and a good portion of your music has been imported from CDs or some other source, you may suffer from significant visual gaps in your library when scrolling through Cover Flow. When this happens Cover Flow’s effect is ruined.
Happily, Apple has added to iTunes the ability to automatically download artwork for music in your library even if of wasn’t purchased from the iTunes store. To add the missing covers, first make sure that you’re signed in to your iTunes account. Go to the Advanced menu and select Get Album Artwork. iTunes will scan your library for tracks with missing artwork and add it for you automatically. After it’s finished (it can take a bit of time if your library is large) you’ll see a big improvement when using Cover Flow view.
iTunes’ Get Album Artwork feature is great, but if you’ve modified any of your track or album names in your library, iTunes likely won’t find the correct artwork. To finish the job, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and add the missing artwork by hand.
Gather Artless Songs into a Playlist
But before you begin, it may be a good idea to size up the magnitude of the task. The best way to do this is to gather all of the songs and albums without cover art into a playlist. And the easiest way to to that is with the help of one of Doug’s AppleScript’s for iTunes.
Doug’s Tracks without Artwork to Playlist script combs your library for faceless albums and creates a playlist with the results. If your library is large, this will take some time, and unfortunately the script doesn’t give you much in the way of status updates, but be assured that it is doing its job and in a few minutes (or 10) you’ll have all your blank albums in one spot.
Once you’ve rounded up all your coverless albums, you can use a few more scripts to search the net for your covers. Try some more of Doug’s scripts for this:
- Search CD Universe for Album Art
- Sloth Radio for Artwork
- MusicOutfitter for Artwork
- Find Album Artwork with Google Image Search
For each of the above scripts, simply select a song in iTunes with no art and run the scrip and a new Safari window will open with your missing art. Adding the art to iTunes is easy: select the correct artless songs and then drag the artwork from Safari onto the aptly named ‘Drag Album Artwork Here’ drop panel in the bottom left corner of iTunes.
Amazon Album Art Widget
Adding album art by hand is certainly no picnic whatever way you look at it. An alternative route to AppleScripts is with the excellent Amazon Album Art widget. In my experience, this is the most convenient way to get the job done quickly.
Download the widget and install it in the daahboard by double clicking the file. Select an album in iTunes with no cover art, open Dashboard and click the little iTunes icon in the Amazon Album Art widget. Your album’s information will automatically populate the search field and send a request up to Amazon for the artwork. To add the art to iTunes, simply click the Set As Album Art in iTunes button and the widget will add it for you to the selected tracks. It’s quick and satisfying.
Fix Unsightly Track Titles with Automator
By now your music library should be looking great. Here’s a final trick to make it look its best.
Occasionally when importing tracks into iTunes, track names will inexplicably show up in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. If this bothers you as much as it does me (i.e., a lot) use this simple Automator action to rewrite them in a more sane fashion.
Open up Automator (in Applications >> Automator) and drag the two actions from the source list (you can filter the list by typing a few characters into the search box). Select the deviantly named tracks in iTunes and run the action from within Automator. Automator will capitalize the first letter of each word and set the rest to lower case.
Adding artwork to your iTunes library can be a daunting task. Nevertheless, as Apple continues to focus on the visual elements of your media library, the steps described above will have your iTunes library looking beautiful when its time to show it off to friends.
