Why dont I use iTunes to get the album art

iTunes store has one of the BEST album art selection in the world. Absolutely nice. Rocks. Fantastic. Full 600×600 size crystal clear album art. If you can get it, it is great.
But….. you must know that if you do that, there is a clear difference between downloading an album art from iTunes and manually adding it to your MP3 file.
A good source is at iLounge Forum where a great guy explained the differences and even has a nice little chart in one of the posts. Read it : to clarify: iTunes 7 ALBUM ARTWORK Issues…

In a nutshell, if you use the iTunes “get artwork” option, as far as I know, this does not embed the artwork within the MP3 files. I prefer my artwork to be in the files so that it always transfers with the MP3 where ever they go – so in this sense, the manual method is better for me.
Another article : now i regret
Also, obviously, there are not many Chinese songs in iTunes and hence it is really a moot point since I buy very little Chinese songs off iTunes. I do buy quite a fair bit of English songs though. I just bought Oasis’ Wonderwall last night. iTunes gave me the album art which is nice but not properly aligned. I had to manually adjust it using my photo editor and paste it back. The virgo in me 🙂
So why is it important for me to be able to able add the album art manually to the MP3 file ? Although I don’t see myself moving away from iTunes, iPod (and in fact, I am dying for iPhone to come to Asia officially in late 2008), it is just that I like the fact that the album art is embedded inside my MP3 file and hence it allows me to move to another PC music player easily (e.g. Windows Media Player, WinAmp etc) or even a hardware player (e.g. Zune or Creative). Media Player Portability 🙂
Have a good week ahead !

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One thought on “Why dont I use iTunes to get the album art

  1. Victor Ly

    I know this entry of yours is a few months old, but I just read it for the first time.

    I did not know iTunes behaved in such a way, so thanks for bringing that to my attention. I’ve only been using iTunes for about a year and only started using iTunes because of the album art/Cover Flow feature (before that, I used Winamp for approximately nine years), so I’m still learning about iTunes.

    I wonder if there’s a way to retrieve album art using iTunes automatically, and then have the retrieved album art “melted” into the files themselves. Please let me know if you know of something along that line.

    Thanks,
    Victor Ly

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