What Apple doesn't want you to know -- Part 2

Well, not really. Which is to say that the following isn't so much what Apple doesn't want you to know as it is what Apple doesn't tell you anywhere. But they should.

It concerns Album art in iTunes (and, by extension, on your iPod/iPhone/Touch, etc). Album art never used to be too big a deal until displays got big enough (and in color) and until Cover Flow (where you view your albums as if looking at your collection) was perfected on the iPhone/Touch. Now that more and more people are using it they've become aware that it doesn't always work properly. I can't tell you for sure how it doesn't work, but I can tell you why, and how to fix it.

There are two ways of getting and storing album art. If you select, in iTunes, "Get Album Art", iTunes will connect to the iTunes store and try and find all the art that matches your albums. It then creates a special folder in iTunes called Album Artwork and stores a copy of the artwork (in a very odd format) for each album, all automagically to you.

In theory this sounds great, but in actual practice there are a few things wrong with it. In the first place, it doesn't always find artwork for an album, or it finds the wrong artwork for an album. More importantly, because of the way it works (or doesn't) it will sometimes get your artwork completely screwed up when it is transferred to your portable device.

The latter is what we are particularly concerned with here -- the artwork can look and act fine in iTunes, but on your iPhone (for example) show the wrong songs, or the wrong artwork, or a combination of the two.

The way to fix it is to use the second method of getting and storing artwork. In this way you select all the songs of the album in iTunes, press Ctrl-I, and paste in the relevent artwork into the artwork box (after first copying it from somewhere -- I like www.albumart.org a lot, but Amazon.com will work as well).

This is a lot more work and it means that a copy of the image is stored in each and every song (unlike the iTunes store method) but the advantage is the artwork is always right -- it never gets screwed up in transfer because it can't (as when the song is transferred the artwork is also transferred correctly).

And it isn't a terrible amount of work -- I did all 800 of my albums in about an afternoon. You also have the advantage of getting really nice artwork, as sometimes the iTunes choices, while technically correct, are not the best ones available. All in all I highly recommend doing it yourself.