Album art/Cover scout questions

[Kumar]

All my music is ripped from CDs into iTunes. I am unable to get album art into any of files.

Since this is just one of those nice to have but not essential things, I haven't bothered about this, but the new Sonos controller started me thinking again about this.

Questions to anyone familiar with Cover Scout.

1. Will the spend of 24 euro for the license allow me to get cover art for all my albums into i Tunes and thence to the i pod when it next syncs with the mac? Since I have some 500 CDs, I am looking for an easy and reliable way to do this. The demo version of Cover Scout doesn't seem to do this.

2. My music files on the mac are copy/pasted into the HDD I use for Sonos, the HDD being plugged into the USB socket of my Time Capsule. What would I have to do to get the album art into this HDD, so it is also visible on the Sonos controller?

Any help or even suggestions for alternative means of doing this - other than the laborious one at a time downloading each art file from the web - would be very welcome.

[buzz]

Kumar,

This FAQ might help.

[IanW]

Kumar,

I use Cover Scout to embed album art into my music collection (about 1000 albums, stored on a Time Capsule and managed by iTunes). On the whole I've found it to work pretty well, and I think it's well worth the asking price if you value your time.

To try to answer your specific questions:

1. Yes, the album art Cover Scout embeds does automatically turn up in tracks synced to my iPhone. As far as I recall this "just works", at least for me.

2. I'm not quite clear I understand your set-up/question, but if the files you copy to the HDD are literally just copies of the ones Cover Scout updates (i.e. the ones iTunes manages) then the album art should be present. I'm pretty sure it is genuinely embedded in the audio files, because when Cover Scout adds the art, the audio files are read and re-written in their entirety.

I hope that helps. If there's anything specific you'd like me to check for you, feel free to ask.

Ian

[Kumar]

Originally Posted by IanW

2. I'm not quite clear I understand your set-up/question, but if the files you copy to the HDD are literally just copies of the ones Cover Scout updates (i.e. the ones iTunes manages) then the album art should be present. I'm pretty sure it is genuinely embedded in the audio files, because when Cover Scout adds the art, the audio files are read and re-written in their entirety.

I hope that helps. If there's anything specific you'd like me to check for you, feel free to ask.

Ian

Ian, thank you. I understand that it will update my iPod via an iTunes sync - just works style.

I am not sure how to get the cover art across to the HDD. When I set up the HDD as the Sonos share, I did so by copy/pasting all the music files from the i Tunes folder on the mac to the HDD. Any time I add a CD to my collection, I rip it on to the mac, and do the copy/paste thing. Clunky perhaps, but it works fine for me and has kept me away from all the Lion/Sonos grief.

How would I get the cover art from the mac - which is where I assume Cover scout would bring it to, across to the Sonos dedicated HDD? Would I have to do the copy/paste all over again, deleting what the HDD currently contains? I think I know the answer, and I suspect I will keep living without cover art.

[IanW]

Ah, I see. As you suspect, re-copying the files from your iTunes library to the dedicated HDD would seem to be the only way. I suppose that may be anything from very straightforward to very fiddly depending on whether it is organised in the same way as iTunes.

(Thinking aloud...) Unless you're used to using the Sonos folder view to navigate your collection, perhaps the organisation of the dedicated HDD doesn't much matter and it would be easier just to delete what you've got and re-copy the iTunes library en masse after adding the album art? A directory sync tool could help here, if you do it in several shots.

Ian