13. Add Album Art to Songs
BEFORE YOU BEGIN
9 Import a Music CD into iTunes
11 Add a Music File to Your iTunes Library
SEE ALSO
77 Carry Your Photos on an iPod photo
As
convenient
and versatile as digital music files are, there are some things about CDs that they can't replace. There's just something special about being able to pick up a CD case and identify it by the artwork on its cover; a listing of songs in bare text format just doesn't bring with it quite the same cachet,
especially
when the listing for a Mozart symphony looks just the same as the one for a ska
band
or standup comedian's routine. Furthermore, CD albums tend to come with booklets full of more artwork, including
lyric
sheets, interviews, cast and crew information, and moresome very
extensive
and thick. Where is the equivalent of these things in the digital music world?
iTunes can't quite provide the same experience as these features of CDs give you. However, you
can
add album art in the form of digital image data to the headers of your MP3 or AAC files. A scanned picture file, even a high-resolution one, is only a few hundred kilobytes at most, compared to the three or four megabytes of a complete digital audio file; thus, adding a piece of album art to a song, or even several pictures at once, doesn't materially increase the impact on your disk space. It can, however, greatly enhance your enjoyment of your music by showing you what the album
looked
like that the song to which you're listening came from.
NOTE
Songs purchased from the iTunes
Music Store
come with their own high-resolution album art already built in; some, in fact, have additional files attached, such as printable PDFs and lyric sheets. You can also buy
videos
from the iTunes
Music Store
; these play in the same display pane used to show album art or in a separate window.
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1.
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Obtain Album Art Images
The first step is to get one or more images of the album art for a given CD album. If you have a scanner, you might choose to scan the cover of your CD jewel case insert, as well as some of the pages from the interior of the insert booklet. Consult the documentation for your scanner if you choose to do it this way; save the final picture files with at least 500 pixels of resolution in both width and height, but don't make it much bigger than 1000 pixels square. Save the image file in JPEG format for the best compression/quality balance. Try to keep each picture under 200 kilobytes in
size
.
13. Add Album Art to Songs
If you don't have a scanner, you can usually find acceptable album art images on the Internet. AMG's Allmusic service (http://www.allmusic.com) has comprehensive discographies for almost all major bands, including album art thatwhile not very high-resolutionwill do in a
pinch
.
WEB RESOURCE
http://www.allmusic.com
The Allmusic site, run by the All Media Guide (AMG), contains comprehensive discography listings of most well-known bands, including album art you can use in your imported music files.
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2.
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Add Album Art by Navigating
Use the
Library
view and the
Browse
columns
to navigate to the music you want to modify. Select a single song, or a
group
of songs, and then choose
File, Get
Info
(or right-click the selected song and choose
Get Info
from the context menu).
TIP
You can select an entire album, or all of an artist's works, by choosing it from the appropriate Browse list. For instance, if you click
Phil Collins
in the
Artist
listing at the top of the iTunes window, and leave
All
selected in the
Album
listing, you can then choose
Get Info
to
simultaneously
edit all the information of all the Phil Collins songs in your Library.
Click the
Artwork
tab of the
Info
dialog box. This pane shows you all the album art currently embedded in the selected song or songs. Use the slider in the lower-right corner to adjust the size of the thumbnails of the images; you can view the thumbnails one at a time at maximum size (click the
Previous
and
Next
buttons
to scroll through the images associated with the selected songs), or at any size down to 32 on-screen at once. You can add more than 32 images if you want.
Click the
Add
button to add another piece of art to the information for the selected song or songs. In the file picker that appears, navigate to the location of the picture you want to add; select it and click
Choose
or
Open
. The picture is added to the display pane. Repeat for all the pictures you want to add to this song or set of songs (you can't add more than one picture at a time). Click
OK
to dismiss the
Info
window.
TIP
You can remove a piece of album art from a song or songs by selecting it in the display pane of the
Info
dialog box and clicking
Delete
.
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3.
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Display the Viewer Pane
Click the
Show Album Art
button under the
Source
pane in the iTunes' window. A smaller pane, labeled
Selected Song
, opens above the button; this
Viewer
pane shows you any album art that already exists in a selected song, or a gray dashed box with a
Drag Album Artwork Here
message if there is no album art in the song.
NOTE
Click the
Selected Song
heading to switch the
Viewer
pane to
Now Playing
if music is playing; this action toggles between viewing the album art for the selected song or for the currently playing track (if the track art is different from what's selected).
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4.
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Drag in Album Art
A quicker way to add album art than the one described in Step 2 is to simply drag picture files from the Finder or Windows Explorer into the
Viewer
pane. You can add multiple pictures at once this wayjust select multiple files and drag them all into the
Viewer
pane with one motion. You can even drag pictures directly from your web browser into the pane, without having to save them to your computer first.
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5.
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Organize Album Art Images in a Song
When you have added multiple pictures to a song or group of songs, you will probably want to set the order in which that artwork appears; this way you can be sure that the album cover artwork appears first, and as you browse the pictures they appear in the correct sequence. Open the
Info
window again for a song or group of songs; click the
Artwork
tab. Adjust the slider until all the pictures are visible at once. Now click and drag the pictures into the order you want them to appear; the first one should go at the upper left, and so on in the normal order you'd expect in reading a page left to right.
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6.
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View Album Art
In iTunes, click the small thumbnail image in the
Viewer
pane to display the full-resolution image in its own window. If there is more than one picture embedded in a song, use the
Left
and
Right
arrow buttons to page through the available pictures.
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TIP
Drag the vertical divider to widen or narrow the
Source
pane. As the
Source
pane grows wider, the
Viewer
pane gets larger
accordingly
, keeping a square shape.
If you have an iPod with a
color
screen (such as the iPod photo), the album art for the current song appears on the
Now Playing
screen; if you press the
Select
button several times to switch through the various control modes, you can view the artwork at the full size of the iPod's screen.
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