Foraging on the Internet for Album Art

[dreamshark]

I started out my weekend by getting up early, making a list, and actually crossing one thing off it (cleaning up my email queue, I think). Then I decided to try to figure out why Cover Flow on my new iPod shows mostly empty pages. Because it's broken, it turns out. I'm not the only one with that problem. But along the way I accidentally discovered how to add album art to iTunes. There is no really great need to have album art when listening on the computer, but just in case they ever get the album art working right on the video iPod, it would be nice if I actually HAD art for most of my songs.

iTunes is supposed to download the album art for you automatically, of course, but that only works with about 10% of my collection. Again, turns out I'm not the only one with this problem. Apparently iTunes doesn't look very hard for art for albums they didn't actually sell you. But you can easily download the album covers from listings on Amazon, select the whole album in iTunes, do Get Info, and just drag the album picture into the frame. It's fun and it's free, and every time you do it you get rewarded by seeing a familiar bit of colorful art pop up when the song starts playing. Somehow I have spent about 4 hours doing this.

Oh, right, I paused for about 20 minutes to have lunch and hose the mud and sand off my bike.

Comments

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

I wonder if you're the first person on my FL to be the recipient of blog spam....

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

You mean you DON'T get blog spam? I'm sure it's only a matter of time. I've already disabled anonymous posting, but apparently that's not enough. When I delete this comment I will mark it as spam and ban ub_scribe from commenting again, which are both options on the comment delete button. Then I will look around the LJ site for a place to complain about this user.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Apparently the way you complain to LJ IS by marking a comment as spam when you delete it. I did that, so anybody else looking at this thread won't have any idea what we were talking about.

It was a post from a "user" called blog_ubscribe claiming they had "listed my blog in their catalog to increase page traffic" or something along those lines. Ew.

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

I had spam show up in some of my really old posts a while back, and I deleted them.

I haven't ever had anything quite so blatant show up so quickly in a new post as you had.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

We never do, because of being friends-only. I saw the comment spam you got, though.

K.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Most of my songs don't have album art associated with them, but a large chunk of my digitized music precedes iTunes, so I forgive them. What's more interesting (to me) is that a bunch of the songs that I haven't heard (from salon.com or other legal downloading sites) has the cover art. People pushing their music are more insistent, or something.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

"Most of my songs don't have album art associated with them, but a large chunk of my digitized music precedes iTunes..."

Same for me. But it's not that the album art isn't out there, it's that iTunes doesn't look very hard for it. If you buy the same song from iTunes, somehow they come up with the album art that they couldn't seem to find when you ripped in your own CD. I didn't care about album art at all until I got an iPod with a screen on it. Then I discovered that it is kinda fun to see the album art instead of just words. Although my brain is extremely bad at visual retrieval of images, it's surprisingly good at image recognition. Cover flow seemed like a really stupid idea to me until I tried it. Turns out your brain needs only a split second of exposure to recognize a familiar album cover.

Now if only Apple would fix the damn bugs in cover flow for the new nano! It's been a long time since I purchased new technology the week it came out (indeed, I'm not sure I've EVER done that before!) and I'm discovering the downside.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I just checked, and a quick scan seems to confirm that the album covers of songs, even the previously digitized songs, that have an album name show up... if the album shows up at all. I didn't check to see if it was out there.

Recognition and retrieval are, indeed, two different types of cognition. That's why I didn't like writing only multiple choice tests though they're a lot easier to grade. I tried to have at least a few short answer or matching questions.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Please tell me what you mean when you say, "you can easily download the album covers from listings on Amazon."

K.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

1) go to www.amazon.com
2) search in "music" for the artist or album name. A bunch of numbered listings will pop up, almost all of which will have a picture of the album cover beside them.
3) Click on the album cover that looks closest the the album art you are looking for. This will open the listing, with the picture slightly larger in the upper lefthand corner. Under the picture there is almost always a link that says "see larger image." Click on this link.
4) The full size image will open in a popup window. Right-click on the image and choose "save image as" (or whatever the equivalent is in Mac land).