One Tip A Day » artwork

Tidy Up iTunes And Other Music Libraries With FixTunes

Tony Williams — Sun, 24 May 2009 12:01:54 +0000

One of the most popular posts of all time on this site is my guide to adding artwork from the iTunes store to iTunes tracks. However, what this post doesn’t cover is how to tidy up and add other missing information to iTunes or other music libraries such as missing artist details, album names, misspellings, genres etc. This typically happens if you haven’t purchased a lot of your music, and after downloading you find yourself with lots of tracks that you can’t find and hence play easily with your mp3 player. Even if you’ve purchased all of your music it can still be missing vital track details.

One option for tidying up your MP3 files is to go through each file or album one by one, find the information you need on the internet or on Amazon, and add it manually. Now, even if you’ve only got a small music library this is going to take a long, long time.

The sensible way to fix your music library and to add missing information is to use an automatic tool that will find and correct missing track details, add missing album artwork and remove duplicates all automatically. The best tool I’ve found that does all of this automatically is FixTunes. This ultrasmart program can even find artwork based on misspellings or missing info. FixTunes works with both iTunes and other MP3 players.

Here are the key features of FixTunes:

Edit the song title, artist, album, track, year and genre tags of your music
Fix your songs automatically, without having to type all the information yourself
Automatically download and add album cover art images to your music files
Look up online information on your music like artist bios and reviews with one click
Rename the music in your library into a standard format
Organize your music into folders according to artist, album, year or genre
Remove duplicate music files from your collection with ease, saving the best version
Quickly search and edit only a portion of your music collection

The automatic mode is fantastic and saves users having to manually accept every change from FixTunes. If you have a big library, just leave it running overnight and it will work its magic overnight.

If by some chance FixTunes makes a mistake then there is a manual option that allows all details to be manually edited.

The trial version of FixTunes can be downloaded for free and works on both Macs and Windows. It’s fully functional so you can see and use all features for a limited time. Update: If you wish to upgrade to the full version, One Tip A Day readers can exclusively receive $5 off by entering the code DD9D6 when checking out.

More: FixTunes

Autorate iTunes Songs

Tony Williams — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 10:03:00 +0000

Managing a big music library can take a lot of work and investment. Keeping tags, playlists, ratings and artwork up to date can be a real chore. Luckily there is a tool, the iTunes Store File Validator, that could help by automatically adding ratings to your iTunes music.

The iTunes Store File Validator automatically applies a rating to your files based on how often they are played or skipped, which can be handy if you a large library. However, it does have a few drawbacks e.g. if you skip a song because you’re not in the right mood to listen to it, rather than it being no good.

Make Your Own Artwork

Tony Williams — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 11:27:27 +0000

Get creative this Friday with artpad. This extremely cool app allows you to create you own online masterpieces.

All you have to do is select your canvas, size, painting tool and you are good to go. You can even sign your print and hang it in a virtual gallery. Better still, you can even purchase your print to hang on your wall!

If you create anything that looks half decent don’t forget to post a link to your masterpiece in a comment!

Thanks to TechDigest for the lead.

How To Add iTunes Artwork To MP3 ID3 Tags Using iTunes

Tony Williams — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 11:45:50 +0000

With iTunes 7, Apple added better support for album artwork. Previously iTunes wouldn’t automatically add artwork if you imported your own tracks. Now with iTunes 7, the program will automatically search the iTunes Music Store (ITMS) for artwork, and if any is available it will add it to your files. The problem is though, iTunes doesn’t add the artwork to the actual ID3 tag within the file that is read when other applications play your mp3s, so the artwork is only visible to iTunes.

I’ve discovered a very quick way of fixing this, which will add the iTunes artwork to your track’s ID3 tag. I prefer using iTunes to add the artwork rather than an external application, as (i) it’s quicker, and (ii) the iTunes artwork is much better quality.

To add album artwork using iTunes do the following:

Find the album you want to add artwork to
Select all the tracks in the album you want to add the iTunes artwork to the ID3 tag
In the bottom left-hand corner click on ‘show/hide artwork’
Right-click on the artwork image that is displayed and select ‘copy’
Now right-click on the tracks you’ve highlighted and select ‘Get info’
In the pop-up box that right-click in the artwork field and select ‘paste’

Once you’ve done this iTunes will now add it’s high quality images to the albums ID3 mp3 tags, which will mean that other mp3 players and apps will now be able to display the artwork.

Best Way To Add iTunes Cover Art – TuneSleeve

Tony Williams — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 00:01:22 +0000

iTunes is a great application, but the way it handles certain processes will create problems in other areas. Take for instance the way it adds artwork. Until recently, iTunes didn’t and then recent versions of iTunes only add artwork to its own database not the raw mp3 file so that other players and applications can see your tracks in all their glory.

I’ve just discovered what for me is the best free (as always!) application to add album artwork to iTunes. TuneSleeve not only has a very intuitive interface allowing the best artwork to be selected, but it also adds the art to raw ID3 tag in the mp3 file so that all players can see the artwork.

Key features:

Being able to work with albums, not individual songs. We’re talking about album artwork after all, aren’t we?
Being able to choose what artwork I want among all possible results found on the internet, because the CD cover for an original edition is not always the same as the 20th anniversary special edition.
In addition to automatic searching, being able to launch an external search in my browser and manually choose the artwork I want by dragging it from my browser to TuneSleeve.
Being able to download artwork for my entire library or a specific playlist.
Being able to exclude songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store, since they already come with good quality artwork.
Being able to exclude songs that already have album artwork, as I might already have spent some precious time manually finding and dragging album cover images for these songs.
Being able to replace existing artwork with the downloaded artwork or to add the downloaded artwork to the existing one, because the software might find a better quality album art than the one that is already there.

What more could you ask for? One word of warning, before you get started. To get the most out of this application you need to ensure that your mp3 files are tagged correctly. The best guide to doing this can be found here.

If you want to dive straight into getting artwork, then download TuneSleeve here.

Add Missing Album Artwork To iTunes

Tony Williams — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 17:07:09 +0000

One of the great features of the latest video iPods is being able to display album art. Unfortunately, none of your mp3′s added to iTunes before the last generation have albumart included, so what do you do?

Luckily, there are some 3rd-party apps out there which will add artwork to your mp3s. The best of the bunch is the iTunes Album Art Importer. It can scan your whole mp3 collection or just one album to try and find missing artwork. When it finds a out and get the album art via the Amazon.com web service, or from the Windows Media Player Album Art which I think is unique.

It is even smart enough to detect whether a track already has art already in place, which can be replaced or left alone. It will also allow the user to choose the best image if multiple covers are found, replacing any existing covers.
Definitely worth a try even if you already have most of your covers sorted.

More: iTunes Album Art Importer