Updated: How-To Download album art from iTunes
This post was published 3 years 2 months 4 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.
Remember many many moons ago, there was a script that used the iTunes music store to download high resolution album art for all your stolen legally ripped MP3’s, but then Apple changed the way the iTunes music store worked and broke that wonderful script? Well, the ability to download that high resolution album artwork is back! Granted, it is not the same as the old method, but it is close enough to count.
Now some of you may ask “Why somebody would want to use this utility when iTunes 7 automatically downloads artwork via the iTunes music store?” The answer is simple, using iTunes 7, Apple only allows the user to download the low resolution artwork of any song that is processed. While I’m sure it is to keep costs down, this low quality artwork is simple unacceptable in certain circles.
Is this for the average person? Yes, it is very simple to especially if you enjoy high resolution album art of your ripped albums.
You may want to bookmark this and thanks to Jesper Nøhr for the code!
Am I doing something wrong? My iTunes 7 downloads a 600 * 600 high resolution version of the cover when I use the “automatic cover download”-function. :-)
Mine is low res :(
mine dont download Beatles album art, nor radiohead… if you dont get the joke, shame on you; anyway, this is great especially when im trying to find all the albums art of all the albums i have.
If this works, I luv you! =)
It works! Ahh! My lovely high resolution artwork! How I’ve missed thee!
is it just me, or you cant select all the songs in an album and drag the art into the drop box and it applys it to all of the songs anymore.
i seem to have to do it one at a time in itunes 7.. where as i used to do the above in 6
yes this is back! it wasnt too many moons ago, maybe earlyier this year it stopped working.
My iTunes 7 downloads a high resolution through, 600×600 exactly. and that is manually clicking download image, i havent tried the automatic yet
i compared it to the script on that page, and they are the exact same images
you might want to post a little link at http://data.uneasysilence.com/uneasydata/assets/itunes/albumart.php if anyone still has that bookmarked, that there is a new script that works. you dont have to, just a thaught
blot0,
YES! You are right, and I find this annoying, too. I think you might be able to do it by just clicking on the album name under the browser (Ctrl+B, in Windows, or View > Show/Hide Browser), and then adding the album art to there. I haven’t tried it yet.
I’ll make the update Alex
This is only given me “clean” art covers. How do i get the covers for the explicit albums.
ok, well I personally am not getting the 600×600 covers when I manually search for them in iTunes 7. Isn’t it confirmed that iTunes 7 does NOT provide 600×600 album art?? why are some people saying otherwise?
Hello Matt,
for some reason, iTunes doesn’t show the high res version of the automatically downloaded covers. Try this: let iTunes download the cover for a song, right click on that little cover window (left bottom of itunes) and say “copy”. view that image in some image viewer like irfanview or xnview. When you copy the cover, iTunes gives you the 600*600 version.
Another annoying thing with iTunes 7 “auto-cover-function” is, that itunes does not put the cover into the mp3s. It stores them elsewhere.
So here is what I do: I let iTunes fetch the covers, right-click-copy the cover, open “information” for all songs of an album and insert the cover. That way, the cover is in the mp3 and it is the high res version.
thanks for the info Roland, but I have a few questions:
1. Why would someone make a script like this if iTunes really does give you 600×600 and all you have to do is copy+paste the cover to your mp3?
2. How do you know that the album art is not stored on the actual mp3 if it is added by the iTunes album-cover-function?
thx!
so where is the script?
is it just me, or does it not work anymore??
oh no… i think it isn’t working anymore!
:( It’s broke!
Well, script doesn’t seem to work, but it is obsolete anyways, because iTunes has now functionality that does that :)