Album Artwork Assistant
Introduction
Album Artwork Assistant finds album cover artwork on the Internet and adds it to music track files in iTunes. Other tools like it exist, but none of them worked the way I wanted, or they cost too much.
The main feature I needed was a batch queue. When the hard disk on which I kept all my music crashed, I had to re-rip my fairly big CD collection. After the ripping, I had to add the album artwork to all tracks again. Embedding is a slow process that blocks iTunes. That is why I wanted a tool with a queue, so I could search for a large number of CD covers quickly and then let the program process the queue unattended while I do important things.
Download & Installation
Album Artwork Assistant.zipThe application requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). It will not run on older OS versions.
Download, unzip and put it into your Applications folder. Launch it.
Usage
Quick Start
In iTunes, select a single track from an album whose artwork you wish to add:
Switch to Album Artwork Assistant and hit the Get Albums button (or press ⌘-Shift-F):
The program selects all tracks that share the album title with the track you selected in iTunes. It shows these tracks in the upper part of its window. These are the tracks that will be modified and if that’s not what you want, you need to fix the album titles in iTunes and click Get Albums again before proceeding. If you just need to remove some tracks instead of finding different ones, you can remove the ones you don’t want to change by selecting them and choosing Delete from the Edit menu.
The lower part of the window shows possible artwork matches found on the Internet on Google image search and amazon.com. If nothing useful shows up, change the search text and hit the Return key to try again, until you find a good match.
Click the image you want as album cover and click the Add Immediately button. The application will tell iTunes to embed the image into the music tracks.
That’s it. If you copy these music tracks to your iPod or iPhone, the artwork will display.
Advanced Tips
Now that you know the basics, here are some power user tricks.
The Queue
Click “Add to Queue” instead of “Add Immediately” to add the current album to the queue:
You can quit and restart the application and it will preserve the queue contents. Click the “Process Queue” button at the bottom of the queue drawer to let it embed all collected images.
Setting the same Artwork for Multiple Albums
Sometimes you may want to assign the same image to multiple albums, for example to multiple-disc CD sets. To do that, select one track from each album in iTunes. Holding down the Command key lets you select multiple tracks.
The remaining steps are the same. Back in Album Artwork Assistant, click the Get Albums button, check the selected tracks and pick an image.
Double-click Images
Double-clicking an image in the search result performs the Add Immediately or Add to Queue action. You can choose between the two in the application preferences.
QuickLook!
Sometimes it’s hard to tell from the thumbnail if it’s the right image. QuickLook to the rescue! Select the image and hit the space bar to show the full resolution image in a QuickLook panel.
iTunes Keyboard Shortcut
The program lets you install an AppleScript with a keyboard shortcut into iTunes:
The script ends up in iTunes’ script menu and its keyboard shortcut is ⌘-Shift-F, the same as in Album Artwork Assistant. Makes it easy to remember :-)
Alternate Search String
The application searches for images using the album title. Sometimes this title is a generic word and the search returns too many unrelated images. In these cases, the little popup in the search field offers an alternate text that includes the artist of the first track:
This should provide more relevant search results.
Web Browser
Sometimes the image search doesn’t turn up anything useful. In these cases, you can try to find an image using the built-in web browser which you get when you switch to “Web Search”.
In this Web Search panel, find an image using Google or some other music website. Hover the mouse cursor over the image and open the contextual menu with the right mouse button (or by clicking while pressing the Ctrl key). The contextual menu lets you add the image immediately or add it to the queue:
Watch this screencast to see the web search feature in action:
FAQ
Here are answers to some frequently asked questions:
This seems to be a bug in Apple’s frameworks. I hope it gets fixed sometime.
Release Notes
More Information
License / Source Code
The program is free. If you like it, you can make a donation or send me something from my wish list :-).
The source code Xcode project package is available on github.