In iTunes, select a single track from an album whose artwork you wish to add:
Switch to Album Artwork Assistant and hit the Get Albums button (or press ⌘-Shift-F):
The program selects all tracks that share the album title with the track you selected in iTunes. It shows these tracks in the upper part of its window. These are the tracks that will be modified and if that’s not what you want, you need to fix the album titles in iTunes and click Get Albums again before proceeding. If you just need to remove some tracks instead of finding different ones, you can remove the ones you don’t want to change by selecting them and choosing Delete from the Edit menu.
The lower part of the window shows possible artwork matches found on the Internet on Google image search and amazon.com. If nothing useful shows up, change the search text and hit the Return key to try again, until you find a good match.
Click the image you want as album cover and click the Add Immediately button. The application will tell iTunes to embed the image into the music tracks.
That’s it. If you copy these music tracks to your iPod or iPhone, the artwork will display.
Now that you know the basics, here are some power user tricks.
Click “Add to Queue” instead of “Add Immediately” to add the current album to the queue:
You can quit and restart the application and it will preserve the queue contents. Click the “Process Queue” button at the bottom of the queue drawer to let it embed all collected images.
Sometimes you may want to assign the same image to multiple albums, for example to multiple-disc CD sets. To do that, select one track from each album in iTunes. Holding down the Command key lets you select multiple tracks.
The remaining steps are the same. Back in Album Artwork Assistant, click the Get Albums button, check the selected tracks and pick an image.
Double-clicking an image in the search result performs the Add Immediately or Add to Queue action. You can choose between the two in the application preferences.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell from the thumbnail if it’s the right image. QuickLook to the rescue! Select the image and hit the space bar to show the full resolution image in a QuickLook panel.
The program lets you install an AppleScript with a keyboard shortcut into iTunes:
The script ends up in iTunes’ script menu and its keyboard shortcut is ⌘-Shift-F, the same as in Album Artwork Assistant. Makes it easy to remember :-)
The application searches for images using the album title. Sometimes this title is a generic word and the search returns too many unrelated images. In these cases, the little popup in the search field offers an alternate text that includes the artist of the first track:
This should provide more relevant search results.
Sometimes the image search doesn’t turn up anything useful. In these cases, you can try to find an image using the built-in web browser which you get when you switch to “Web Search”.
In this Web Search panel, find an image using Google or some other music website. Hover the mouse cursor over the image and open the contextual menu with the right mouse button (or by clicking while pressing the Ctrl key). The contextual menu lets you add the image immediately or add it to the queue:
Watch this screencast to see the web search feature in action:
Here are answers to some frequently asked questions:
This seems to be a bug in Apple’s frameworks. I hope it gets fixed sometime.
This applies if you see a bunch of lines like the following in the crash report details:
TDescriptor::CreateMatchingDescriptorInternal(__CFSet const*) const + 237 TDescriptor::InitBaseFont() + 30 TDescriptor::CreateMatchingDescriptor(__CFSet const*) const + 47 __NSFontFactoryWithName + 412 +[NSFont fontWithName:size:] + 51 -[IKImageBrowserView _setDefaultTextAttributes] + 288 -[IKImageBrowserView setAppearanceStyle:] + 42 -[IKImageBrowserView _ikCommonInit] + 2122 -[IKImageBrowserView initWithCoder:] + 76
This is another bug in the system frameworks that I have no control over. I think it only happens on Mac OS X 10.5, so you should upgrade to 10.6 and the newest version of Album Artwork Assistant.