WMP11 & iTunes artwork question

[NeilC]

Been trialling WMP11 vs iTunes. Both seem to have some difficulties with retrieving album art. Could someone explain to me what is going on here:

iTunes doesn’t automatically find artwork for a lot of my older CDs. So I cut and paste covers from places like Amazon. In order to get the artwork against every track in the album I select all the tracks in it and use the edit info function and paste the art into the box. I don’t use the box on the left of the screen since this doesn’t seem to associate the art with every track.

I believe that if I then use the convert ID3 tags function on the tracks to convert to ID3 2.3 that this ensures the art is embedded into the MP3 tags – is this correct? Or does the edit info paste do this anyway? Either way I’m led to believe that the tags should now contain the art rather than it being held in the iTunes art database.

In which case why when I point WMP11 at the same files does it not always have any art for the album they are in?

Also iTunes sometimes tells me it can’t find any art on ripping the CD but later , when I use the get artwork function, it does find it. By this point I’ve added the art to the files manually. When it does find the art it updates all the tracks in the album except the first one which retains the cut’n’paste art I added manually. Can I not just update all the tracks in the album?

Thanks

 

[The_Animus]

I'm not an expert and as such I don't know many of the answers to your questions.

lso iTunes sometimes tells me it can’t find any art on ripping the CD but later , when I use the get artwork function, it does find it.

It seems to me when ripping the CD it only checks the CD for the art. But when you do the get artwork function it also looks online for the artwork. So maybe it has issues finding the artwork on the CD if its there at all, but can later find the art content online.

 

[Davo]

I think Itunes only gets album art of tracks you have downloaded through Itunes.

Easy way to get the album art is to use Google /images, type the name of required album..(there is prettymuch every album cover there). You can just drag and drop the album artwork into Itunes.

I`m using a Mac, assuming the PC version Itunes is the same..

 

[NeilC]

I looked into this a bit further. It seems that WMP11 currently has it's own seperate artwork issues which complicates the issue.

I think iTunes will look up artwork for both CDs and MP3 albums obtained elsewhere but the naming of the tracks needs to be what Apple use or it won't recognise them. it does it automatically if you have the option checked. But it's not very good at older or more obscure stuff. I checked my tags with MP3tag and pasting artwork from google and amazon into the art box does indeed update the tags themselves which is good.

WMP does a much better job at artwork in that it will be less rigid but also use audio recognition of individual tracks. I've noticed it had renamed some of my individual files in the background when I left it on for a few hours. It found some really quite obscure stuff. This is great if you want it but for my own compilation albums it is a drag since it renamed some tracks and which caused them to form their own albums. I have about 900 odd dance tracks - I really don't don't want about 700 albums to form from that.

I think WMP is actually better now at arranging albums etc - you get to see many more on the screen at one time and it groups then according to artist which is neat. I've got hundreds of albums and iTunes only show about 2 or 3 at any one time which means it takes ages to browse (unless anyone knows of a way of getting a tiled album view or similar?). Plus it's not limited to quicktime movies.

I just wish WMP11 didn't do quite so much work on it's own initiative and also had internet radio stations as part of the Library like iTunes does. I'd like my audio, video and radio to all use the same interface. Neither of them do that really. If WMP does that then I'll move across I think.