iTunes Artwork and OCD

It took me a while, but I have finally digitized my entire CD collection into iTunes. That's over 600 CD's - pffff. But now comes the hard part - if you have an Obsessive Compulsive streak like me - the artwork and genre indexing. Combining my music (which is way in excess of 600 albums as I have downloaded a lot music too) with Merel's collection, brings us to over 25.000 songs. Over 100GB of music. Some of it without artwork and much of it labelled with genres that mean nothing to me. So how am I tackling this gigantian job?

I've looked into some iTunes artwork tools, but so far nothing has really worked better than the manual, dedicated librarian approach:

• Put iTunes view into "Group in a list with artwork" view
• Scroll to find missing artwork
• Find the artwork online (I am not crazy enough to scan it all!)
• Add it to iTunes in the CORRECT way (see below)
• Enjoy coverflow without any gaps in it and show it to all your friends who will probably declare you insane, but will then ask if you'll do their collection too

Finding the artwork can be a hassle. iTunes has a built in artwork downloading tool, but it sometimes can't find artwork for even the most mainstream of albums, which surprises me somewhat ("Help!" by the Beatles can't be found?). Amazon.com has a nice selection of artwork, but for the more abstract titles the images are often much smaller than the 300x300 pixels required by iTunes, resulting in blurry images. I have found a great site (Slothradio Covers) with almost everything, although you have to be very accurate in your searches.

As far as adding the artwork in the correct way is concerned. Don't drag it to the mini-artwork viewer (pictured above), instead, find the artwork online and copy it to your clipboard (ctrl-c / cmd-c).Then, in iTunes, select all the songs in an album.

Then call up the Info (ctrl-i / cmd-i / right-click > Get Info). If you have selected multiple songs you'll see the window shown below. Click on the little white artwork square on the right and paste from your clipboard ctrl-v / cmd-v)

That will attach the artwork to the mp3's themselves (in the ID3 tag) instead of in a separate iTunes location. So if you copy the mp3's onto another harddisk or burn them on CD for a friend (tsk, tsk, how illegal!), then the artwork is still attached. If you do it the way iTunes wants you to, the artwork only appears in iTunes. I personally don't like getting locked into certain software (although owning an iPod has already done that to me). If I am going to be spending weeks of my life gathering artwork for my music, I want to be able to transfer that information (metadata) to a different platform / program one day.

OK, so the fact that I probably have a serious psychological disorder if I feel the need to categorise and organise a 100GB+ music collection is something we should perhaps keep for another post If I want a career change I could always become a librarian I suppose. That would give me more time than I have now to devote to this kind of obsession hobby.