iPod: The Missing Manual, 7th Edition

Fetch Missing Album Covers

Songs you download from the iTunes Store often include artwork—usually a picture of the album cover. iTunes displays the picture in the lower-left corner of its main window (you may need to click the Show Artwork icon at lower left). Covers also appear in both the Grid and Cover Flow views. But even if you ripped most of your music from your own CDs, you're not stuck with artless tracks. You can ask iTunes to head to the Internet and try to find as many album covers for your music as it can.

You need a (free) iTunes Store account to make this work, so if you haven't signed up yet, flip ahead to Chapter 7 to learn how. To make iTunes go fetch, choose Advanced→Get Album Artwork. Since Apple has to root around in your library to figure out what covers you need, you get an alert box warning you that the company will be getting personal information from you (but it's not laughing at your Bay City Rollers tracks).

Then go fetch yourself a sandwich while iTunes gets to work. If you have a huge library, this may take a little while. When iTunes finishes, though, you should have a healthy dose of album art whizzing by in Cover Flow view or filling up the Grid in the middle of the iTunes window.

If iTunes can't find certain album covers on its own, it gives you a message with a list of the artwork it couldn't track down. You can use this helpful list to hunt for and ...