A Trio of Album Artwork Utilities for iTunes

Whether it's List view, Grid view, or Cover Flow -- finally, with iTunes 8, album cover art is available in whichever way you view your digital music collection. High time to fill the remaining cover art gaps in your library, if you haven't done so yet. There are numerous software tools available to help you with this task, and this blog post will present three rather different, yet equally noteworthy representatives of that software genre.

Simple, yet versatile: Amazon Album Art Widget

The widget's main view.

The first utility I ever used to add album artwork to my music collection in iTunes is Simon Whitaker's Amazon Album Art widget, and it's still a very handy little tool.

By clicking on the miniature iTunes icon next to Amazon Album Art's search box, the widget compiles a search term from the currently selected tracks in iTunes and searches for artwork on one of seven Amazon websites, which you select from a pop-up menu on the "back" of the widget, and presents what it considers the best match. Clicking on the "Set as album art in iTunes" button adds that image to the selected tracks.

Sometimes, the widget will find more than one image file, and by clicking the square icon in the top right corner, you can display all available images and select one by clicking on it.

A selection of several artwork files found by the widget.

The neat thing about this widget is its editable search field: if you aren't happy with the search results, you can edit the search term and try again until you find exactly what you are looking for.

Unfortunately, the size of the preview thumbnails for multiple search results is too small to gauge the quality of the image, and even previewing a cover at "full size" in the Amazon Album Art widget's main view won't give you a real clue as to how good the image will look in iTunes, so finding the perfect image may require a bit of back-and-forth between Dashboard and iTunes. I'd find it helpful if the widget's main view were resizable, or if the thumbnail view would show each images' resolution as a first indicator of image quality.

Still, the Amazon Album Art widget is a versatile little helper that does not get in the way, is at your service at the press of a key, and being donation ware, it "costs" just as much as you value it.

Amazon Album Art product page

Fully automatic: Album Art Thingy

In this trio of album artwork utilities, Album Artwork Thingy -- by the same developer as the Amazon Album Art widget, by the way -- represents the "install and forget" fraction: once you have configured its preferences to your liking, this application lives quietly in your Mac's menu bar, hiding behind an inconspicuous "color LED" icon, and does its magic behind the scenes.

Album Art Thingy constantly monitors iTunes for the currently playing track, and for any track that does that not yet feature album artwork, it will go search a selection of Amazon websites for an image, download it, and apply it to the track or whole album without requiring any user interaction. As a nice extra, it can also go lyrics-hunting if the respective track's lyrics field is empty.

Album Art Thingy's main user interface. The currently playing track is displayed at the bottom of the menu.

The application's menu bar icon indicates whether the search was successful: a green "LED" means that the track already features artwork or that Album Art Thingy could add new artwork, while red means "no artwork yet, and none found, either." Optionally, Album Art Thingy can also display Growl notifications whenever fresh album artwork and/or lyrics were added.

Album Art Thingy's search preferences with the list of search sites, which can be sorted by priority via drag-n-drop, and the somewhat enigmatic "Matching accuracy" slider.

There is one minor drawback to the application's automatic operation, however: Album Art Thingy will always apply the best match for a search, whose accuracy is set via a slider in the preferences, but it's hard to gauge what influence this slider's setting has on the search results, and you cannot manually trigger a new search. So, if you are not happy with the album art file downloaded by Album Art Thingy, you can't tell the application to go search for an alternative image. In those cases, though, the aforementioned Amazon Album Art widget easily fills this gap in Album Art Thingy's feature set.

At $15, Album Art Thingy may seem a bit pricey, but it is the only software that I'm aware of that works fully automatically. What's more, the software worked without a problem during extended testing; the majority of artwork downloads were spot-on; and, with the minor exception of the somewhat enigmatic "Matching accuracy" slider, the interface is clean and polished.

When it comes to completing the artwork images -- and lyrics -- in your iTunes library with a minimum of hassle, Album Art Thingy is a clear winner and well worth its price tag.

Album Art Thingy product page

The one-stop album cover art shop: CoverScout

CoverScout is quite the opposite of Album Art Thingy: it requires quite a bit of user interaction, but also provides the most flexibility in terms of artwork sources and how to apply these to the iTunes music files. That flexibility is reflected in the complexity of CoverScout's user interface, which may appear a bit overwhelming at first, at least for this category of software. Once you have used it on a few artwork-lacking albums, though, you'll see just how tidy and well-though-through CoverScout really is.

Your complete iTunes library in view

CoverScout works a bit differently from most other programs of this type: instead of poking iTunes for the track selection or the currently playing tune, it loads the entire iTunes library's metadata at launch. All albums are displayed in one list, and another list shows all the tracks for the selected album. An icon in front of the album or track entry shows that item's album artwork status. Additionally, a green checkmark ascerts that that album's, or track's, album art is complete and embedded into the file (more on that later).

CoverScout's main window: two lists for albums and tracks, a drawer with finished, active, and pending searches on the left, and previews for the selected search at the center. The drawer at the bottom is a multi-slot clip board for artwork images.

To go searching for artwork, you make a selection of albums or tracks and click on one of the two search buttons, one for Amazon, one for Google Image search. For Amazon searches, CoverScout creates separate searches, one per album, which are displayed in the Progress drawer. Once such a search is completed, clicking it reveals the images in the preview pane that CoverScout found online for the respective album.

For each image, the listed size in pixels gives a good first idea of the quality of the image you can expect, and by using the size slider above the preview area, you can zoom in all the way to comfortably choose the best-looking image to be added to your iTunes library. Once you've made your choice, double-clicking the image will add that image to all tracks in the album.

For Google Image searches, the result is displayed as a web browser view of the Google website right inside CoverScout. Control-clicking any image in this webview selects it for use with the respective album. Very convenient.

Apart from this basic functionality -- which expression is quite an understatement, considering the depth of these features in the software --, CoverScout has two less obvious, but very handy features: taking photos of an album cover via a camera connected to the Mac, and embedding art images from the iTunes library into the files themselves.

Point-n-shoot that CD cover!

Depending on how exotic your music taste is, finding decent cover art online may be difficult or impossible, so that taking a photo of the CD cover is the only viable option. This is where CoverScout shines, as it has support for cameras built in: click the camera icon inside the Edit window, and you see a preview of what, say, your Mac's built-in iSight can see. Click "Capture" to shoot the cover, tilt, zoom, and crop as needed, and you're ready to use it as album artwork.

CoverScout's built-in camera support for those rare CDs that you won't find artwork for online, in this case, a CD by my good friend Robert Voelk's delightfully whacky Cyberfunk project, that is only offered via "sneaker distribution."

Unfortunately, there is one design flaw in this feature that makes using it unnecessarily difficult: the camera preview is not mirrored, i.e., moving the image towards the right of the camera will move it towards the left in the preview, etc., so that aligning the physical CD cover in front of the camera is a royal pain. Please, equinux, change this in an upcoming update so that it works like the camera preview in iChat.

Embedding album artwork in the music files

Whenever you use iTunes's built-in feature for adding album art -- the Get Album Art item in the Advanced menu or in contextual menus --, the artwork image files are stored separately from the audio files in the Music/iTunes/Album Artwork folder inside your home folder. This is great for saving a bit of disk space by keeping just one copy of each image file, even when this file is assigned to multiple tracks.

But it also means that, when using a shared iTunes library for several user accounts on your Mac, you have to manage album art separately for each account. Also, moving your library to another machine requires extra steps to ensure that you bring the album art along with the music. Embedding the album artwork inside the audio files increases these files' sizes, but it makes maintaining cover art much simpler. CoverScout can distinguish between both types of artwork, and it even lets you embed images stored separately by iTunes into the audio files.

Unfortunately, that feature did not seem to work quite as intended on my iMac (running OS X 10.5.5, iTunes 8.0.1, and the recent release of CoverScout, v. 2.3.9): the status icon for embedded artwork did not show for any of the files in my library, even though I'm sure that I have lots of non-embedded artwork in that library. Also, for some files the green checkmark -- indicating complete and embedded artwork -- only appears when I manually click on each track of the affected albums. I assume that these are the albums that feature separately stored artwork, and that Apple has changed something in iTunes 8 about the way these files are handled, so that the developers of CoverScout may yet have to adopt their software to these changes.

The surprisingly gentle 500lb Gorilla of album art utilities

Apart from the quirk described in the last paragraph and the issue with the camera preview, CoverScout is a powerful, very pleasant-to-use utility that covers just about every function you need to manage the artwork in your iTunes library. Not everyone may see a need for the depth of all the features that CoverScout brings along, but if you consider yourself a true "album artwork aficionado," you'll appreciate the thought and fine-tuning the developers have applied to the whole application.

At $20, CoverScout is expensive for what some may consider a one-trick pony. But considering that it's a pretty capable one-trick pony, I consider that price good value for money -- at least for said aficionados.

CoverScout product page

Which album art utility is right for you?

If you're just starting out with adding artwork to your media library, the combination of iTunes's built-in search and the Amazon Album Art widget is all you need. Unless you dislike the idea of having to manually trigger the latter to fill the album artwork gaps in your collection. In that case, i.e., if convenience is your key goal, give Album Artwork Thingy a try.

You insist to add only the most gorgeous artwork available in Netland; you have CDs in your collection that are as rare as an Apple I in working condition; and you can't bear to see a single album that features no cover art? In that case, CoverScout, is just what you need.