I’ve been using iTunes a lot more lately. I held out for a long as a champion of Winamp, but iTunes does a lot of nice stuff with podcasts and a few other features. One of the nice things about using iTunes is how it integrates your album art with your mp3 collections. If the album art is present on the hard drive you will see the album cover when you play the song on your iPod or in iTunes. That’s a great touch. Only problem is, since I’ve never bought a song off iTunes most of my mp3’s lack the accompanying album cover art. No problem! There are several cool solutions that have sprung up to help with this:
1. Artie by Patrick Moberg. Artie is a ajaxy website that finds the missing album cover art for your music library. All you do is upload your iTunes playlist XML file and it searches various online sources to find the missing album art, which you then drag into the art window in iTunes to add it to the associated mp3’s.
2. iTunes Companion by Knut August Johansen. This is probably the easiest way to update your cover art since once you set it up it automatically updates the album art as your music plays, by searching Amazon for the album listed in the ID3 tag of your mp3 files. iTunes Companion is a widget for Yahoo’s widget engine (formerly known as Konfabulator), and it works very well.
If you’re using iTunes you could also do all of this manually by searching for the album or single name in Google image search (GIS).