Last week MacSeven.com reader Mark from Toronto wrote complaining about Album Art only being available from iTMS with an account, he didn't like that he had to give Apple a credit card when all he wanted was album art.

I did a bit of research on this topic and found a very elegant solution, and one which has a much higher success ratio than iTMS in getting Album Art. It does take longer, but works really well and it doesn't use iTMS.

There are two applications necessary to make this happen, well, really one application and one AppleScript.

GimmeSomeTune is a great application that has the ability to grab album art (cover art). The image below is what GimmeSomeTune shows when a new track plays on iTunes.

You can set the preferences to grab Art if it is missing. Click here to see the setting to make so that it grabs your album art. Whenever you play a song or album without art, GimmeSomeTune will fetch it for you.

Now for the AppleScript to help you grab all your album art. Needle Drop from Doug's Apple Scripts will let you play through your library for X seconds per track.

Step by Step Method for grabbing your missing album art.
1) Install GimmeSomeTune
2) Set GimmeSomeTune to download album art
3) Fire up iTunes and start it playing from the first track in your library.
4) Run Needle Drop and tell it to play each track for 10 seconds, starting at (enter any number you like, 0 is default)

Needle Drop will advance to the next track after 10 seconds, repeat until the end of your library. And for each track played, GimmeSomeTune will try to fetch the correct album art.

The only albums I'm having trouble with it grabbing as a group are those with "Various Artists" as the group name. If you have any suggestions on how to get those to work please let me know.


Your Comments appreciated.
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