Ye Olde iTunes?

[Tunney]

I'm one of the few people who really loves iTunes. Yes, it's a resource hog and yes it makes you install Quicktime every time you upgrade. But the interface is clean and it's easy to use. In particular, the quality and accuracy of the artwork is always perfect.

The problem is that iTunes doesn't embed the artwork into the actual music file. That means that if I want to play music on my phone, I don't get the artwork.

Now I know that iTunes used to embed the artwork. Is there some fabled older version of iTunes that automatically gets the artwork from the iTunes store and embeds it into the file? Have these two features ever co-existed in iTunes?

Failing that, is there any software for Windows that'll go through my collection embedding the artwork already stored in iTunes?

And failing that, what's the best ripping/auto-artwork embedding alternative? I've used MediaMonkey in the past and I found its artwork selection and ID tagging pretty fiddly.

 

[LeperousDust]

AFAIK it hasn't ever done this, not while i used it anyway. Look to MusicBrainz Picard tagger with the album art plugin installed, leave it going it will tag and embed and rename (or whatever you want) your whole music collection with the very minimum of input

I used it to tag embed album art and rename 30Gb of unorganised music over the space of a day with me just giving it a point in the right dirrection every so often, simple as once setup...

I use MediaMonkey now, but for playing music as there is nothing better out there, and it gives me more freedomwith my iPod than iTunes ever could! But i don't really use it for naming/tagging (thats MusicBrainz job now).

 

[Tunney]

Thanks for the tip. It definitely embedded art at one point in its life. I don't know whether that was before or after Apple added the feature to automatically download artwork from the iTunes store though.