album art question....

[is250sp]

All of my music is on external hard drive and most of the album art was manually pasted since it was ripped from cd. My question is, if i get a new pc and add the media to iTunes, will it retain the album art? If not, is there an album art folder i can backup on old pc and restore to new pc?

[psylichon]

If your album art is embedded in the mp3 files themselves, iTunes seems to have about a 50% success rate in parsing that (at least from my experience). If it's a .png or .jpg in the same folder as the mp3's, even less chance, although if your art files are of the latter type, you can drag them and drop them into the appropriate mp3's in iTunes (in the info for each... you just have to do that manually for all the art that iTunes can't find... which will likely be a lot of them). I find draggin-and-dropping from Google Images results right into iTunes works pretty well without too much hassle.

How big is your library?

[is250sp]

I have over 500 and it would be a pain to re-add the art. I just noticed that there is a default folder called Album Artwork in My Music\iTunes folder. Would copying that folder over to the new pc work?

[psylichon]

No, iTunes uses that for coverflow cache. Who knows, you may get lucky and iTunes will recognize most, leaving only a couple to manually add. It's really not that hard.

You didn't mention which method you've used to save your art up to this point...

[is250sp]

I know it's not hard, the problem is its time consuming to find out which has it or not as i have to open every single song...unless you know a better way to determine which has art or not.

The way I add art is either (1) play a song so it has the focus, then copy and paste into the album art area at lower left, or (2) go the the song's "Get Info", Artwork tab, and paste there.

I am trying your drag and drop method, but i dont think i am doing it right. Can you give step by step instructions.

[psylichon]

It all depends on how you have your stuff organized.

Personally, I had all my mp3's organized by artist folder, then subfolders for albums. All these were in a large "MP3" folder. I elect not to have iTunes organize my library (i.e. it doesn't copy it into the iTunes library folder in My Documents), I just imported the entire mp3 folder.

Now, obviously you will need to have your tags in order, which was definitely the hardest part. Once they're in iTunes, they can be a mess to sort if the tags are all out of whack.

But album art is rather easy. Shift-highlight all the songs on an album, right click and "get info". there is a square for artwork. If there is art for the album, you'll see it here. If not, drag a picture file. You can even drag an image right from a web browser (i.e. from a Google Images search) and it will apply to all the songs. Once you get a rhythm going, you'll have all your albums done in an hour.