How To Download Cover Art In ITunes

Step 1: You will need

Step 2: Viewing cover art.

If you don't see any cover art when you play a song in iTunes, go to "View" in the top menu and then click on "Show Artwork". By clicking on the "Now Playing" bar at the top of the window that appears, you can switch between displaying the artwork for the song that's currently playing and a song you've clicked on or "Selected" in the library. When you're listening to your iPod, the artwork is displayed automatically with the song title.

Step 3: Make sure you song information is complete.

There are several ways of getting any artwork you're missing, but you need to make sure the track name, artist and album information are complete and accurate for each song as this will save you a lot of hassle later on. Any songs bought from the iTunes Store will already have all of this information in place and most likely their album artwork too, so you can ignore those. If you've got songs have come from a CD you've bought in the shops then iTunes should also have automatically named the tracks and album when you imported them, but if it didn't simply select the songs you've imported - they'll most likely have been called Track 1, 2, 3 and so on and then got to the "Advanced" menu at the top of the screen and click "Get CD Track Names". The problems arise when you've got songs that you've either downloaded or imported from elsewhere, as they'll often have information missing or be incorrectly spelt. There are software programs that will automatically find this missing information but they aren't always perfect, so depending on how many mysterious unnamed songs you have in you library, it might be best to enter the information manually for each track. Simply click on the empty Name, Artist or Album column and type the missing information. If you don't know the album or artist name, you can usually find it by putting the song name and the word "album" or "artist" into Google.

Step 4: Getting album artwork with iTunes.

Once all the information is in place, you're ready to start filling the gaps in your collection. Apple recently introduced a feature to iTunes to automatically download any missing artwork. Simply select the song or songs that are missing their covers and go to the "Advanced" menu at the top of the screen, then click on "Get Album Artwork". There are a few limitations to this, though. For a start, iTunes will only find artwork for songs that are available in the iTunes store and while that's a big list, it's not exhaustive. You'll also need an account with the iTunes store in order to use this function. It's free and once it's done, it's done, but it still adds an extra level of complication to the process. On top of all that if the song and artist information you gathered earlier is incomplete or inaccurate then, like any of the software methods I'll talk about here, iTunes will struggle to find the correct artwork.

Step 5: Software alternatives.

As an alternative to iTunes' built in options, you can also download separate applications or plugins that will search sites like Google and Amazon to find the artwork you are missing. As always, the more accurate your song, artist and album information is, the better the results you'll get - Just be aware that many of these programs will search American websites by default and you'll therefore end up with the American CD artwork which is sometimes different to what we get in the UK. Sure, it's not the end of the world, but to the music completist, there's nothing more jarring than something that isn't quite right. Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard users can find various free Widgets that will search Amazon for iTunes artwork, but another option is to go to www.apple.com/downloads/macosx, where you'll find a free program called GimmieSomeTune which not only finds the album artwork for the current song but will also dis