IArtwork downloads album art in Itunes
Description: IArtwork is an Itunes add-on that scans your Itunes library for available album art. It can then either downloads all missing album art en-masse and/or allow you to manage individual album instances individually.
Although Itunes is equipped to download album art, it requires you to have an ITunes account and be logged in order to download album art. It also tends to be extremely picky about how the music is tagged if it is to download album art at all. And even if you get the album art downloading to function properly, you still need to manually flip through all of the albums individually to search and download album art, which requires quite a bit of work on the part of the user.
What IArtwork can do, on the other hand, is scan you library for all album artwork, download all missing album art sequentially, and display everything in a list. The user can then go down the list and individually intervene/edit any entry that may have been processed incorrectly and/or attempt to manually locate/identify albums whose album art was not found automatically. Here are more notes on this program:
How it works: clicking on the IArtwork shortcut will launch both IArtwork and Itunes. It will present you with a “you have x albums with no artwork message”, and give you the option find/update them.- En-masse editing: you can scroll down a list of album art and optionally remove the album art or manually intervene/change the available album art. The list allows is a very good way to quickly go over your entire music collection and fix/edit it (see first screenshot above).
Manual intervention: clicking on an individual entry will open a dialog where you can adjust the search string, flip through the results, and hone in on the correct album art which was not automatically found. Works very well.- Artwork downloading source: the artwork is downloaded from Amazon.com (update: previously this was unknown to me but the developers were kind enough to email me and let me know).
- Resource utilization: the task manager has this process as using a whopping 96 megs of memory, which is simply way too much. I’m not sure how this can be the case; my guess is that it is simply inefficient in its memory use because it is still in beta. Regardless, you can simply use this software once, fix your collection, and not use it again until you need to (i.e. it doesn’t need to be always present, consuming resources).
The verdict: this is a perfect plugin for quickly managing album art in Itunes. It is similar to another one previously reviewed on Freewaregenius (Itunes Art Importer), but this latter one is no longer in development, and IArtwork is much more straightforward and simpler to use. Moreover, IArtwork has a clear edge in that it processes your entire music library at once, rather than forcing you to process each album seperately. If you have an Ipod or Iphone and would like to fix your album artwork, IArtwork might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.
Version Tested: 1.0 beta
Compatibility: Windows Vista or Windows XP with .NET Framework 2.0; Itunes v7.4 or higher.
Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 42K).
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Any suggestions for a non-iTunes version of this program?
ImageToMp3 Pro (go here) does something similar, although it will process a single album at a time, and for some reason downloaded album art doesn’t display correctly on the Ipod.
To be fair iTunes Art Importer would process whatever you had selected in the iTunes library (so you could multi-select any number of files).
This actually puts iArtwork at a disadvantage, because with iTunes Art Importer I could select just the new songs that I’d added to my library recently, so it wouldn’t go through the entire library every time.
But I agree that iArtwork is superior in every other way, and I’m sure future versions will add support to constrain it to only run on selected songs.
non itunes users DO need something similar… help us!
To the person who has been leaving retarded comments in this section:
(a) the world doesn’t owe you anything. This is a free service that you are not paying for. If you didn’t find what you are looking for look elsewhere. It makes no difference to me whether you visit this site or not.
(b) if you cannot use the comments section like a civilized, normal human, then don’t. Go elsewhere.
(c) oh and by the way, this program really IS freeware. It was free when i reviewed it and I just checked again, it is still free.
I can’t use IAimporter with my Vista 64bits. First ask me about .NET frameworks. But I’ve already have it and still can’t install the program. Is true that IAimporter doesn’t work with Vista64? Thks!!! I’m from Argentina. Bye!!
It does seem to do a great job of finding the artwork! However, after clicking “Find and View results” it tells me that it found artwork for 51 albums, but shows *all* of my albums (hundreds) in the list. How do I know which ones were updated?? I don’t want to go through my entire library to make sure it didn’t make a mistake. Also, as beau mentioned, the inability to select a single album (or albums) makes this frustrating to use.
I *wish* it only used 96 megs of memory. After running through my library the usage went as high as 750 megs. After several minutes of sitting it went down to less than 3 megs. This was version 1.2.0.0 and says nothing about being in BETA. As a developer, this is unacceptable for a full release.
Just my two cents. I’m going to check out iTunes Art Importer.
As for being “freeware”, maybe you should check the site again. Particularly the part that states “The free version of iArtwork allows updates of 50 albums to iTunes. To get unlimited access pay only $7.80 to activate the software.”
Hey Now…
What cxspan said…
I was just looking for MISSING artwork. Plus it gave me bogus artwork for albums it couldn’t find. Granted they were live Grateful Dead shows, but I’d rather get no result than false positives.
I’m gonna keep looking, this is a huge hair up my ass…
~ hayduke
iArtwork is not free!!!!!!!!!!!