Hello, my name is Mike Digdon, and I'm addicted to cover art.
There, I said it. Now I can take the next step towards recovery, although I'm not all that certain I want to recover, since cover art is fun!
Let's take a few steps back, to give this some context.
One of the nifty things about the Nano is that it has a covert art mode, just like the iPhone/iPod Touch. I don't particularly use the cover art mode to choose an album to play all that often, but it is nice to flip through the collection every once in a while.
The big thing for me is that I absolutely can't stand seeing that yucky grey default cover picture that the iPod uses when there's no cover art for a particular album/song, so I absolutely insist that every song loaded onto my iPod have the cover art from the album that I ripped it from.
When you rip a CD into iTunes, iTunes has an option to go fetch the album art for you. I find that this only works some of the time. There are typically two reasons why it doesn't seem to work all that well for me.
The first is that iTunes seems to sometimes grab the wrong cover art for a particular album. Unfortunately, it grabs the first entry it finds and that's what you're stuck with. This is something that Window Media Player has in it's favour - if it detects multiple entries for a particular album, you are presented with the list of possibilities and then you can select the one that is appropriate for you.
The second is that I seem to have a bunch of albums that aren't available on iTunes. If an album isn't available, there's no cover art for it. Bummer.
All is not lost, however, since iTunes has a mechanism to load cover art images from disk. The only question was "where would I get the images?"
Of course, I knew that Windows Media Player keeps track of cover art images, so I figured that if I could find out where they were stored on my computer, I could just use WMP to find all of the missing images. So, I went through the effort of trying to find those images.
After much searching the internet, I discovered that the images are kept in the album folder in a file called Folder.jpg. Of course, these are hidden files, so I first had to modify the folder view options in order to be able to see them.
Somewhere along the line, it occured to me that going to Amazon, looking up the album, and saving the cover art image to a local file would be a lot easier. It also wasn't too much later that I discovered that I can simply paste a cover art image into iTunes, rather than loading one from disk.
I still use iTunes to find the cover art first. If the correct image cannot be found, I then go to Amazon and get the correct image.
One day, I happened to look at the Nano while it was playing a song and noticed the evil default cover art image. I was a little confused about that, since I knew that I had installed the correct cover art image. And thus another little idiosyncrasy with iTunes was revealed.
When you have iTunes download cover art or your opt to add it in yourself via the "Get Info" option, the image is only attached to whatever songs you currently have selected. Ultimately, this makes perfect sense, but what confused me is that I would click on the first song and use iTunes to fetch the image, which would eventually be revealed. However, sometimes only portions of the album art would be revealed. By clicking on the other songs in the album, additional portions would be revealed. I have no idea why iTunes does this, but it led me to believe that the album art was attached to all songs in the album. Apparently not.
Once I had figured out that I need to select all songs in the album first, everything has been fine, and I'm able to collect my cover art with ruthless efficiency.
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