Cover Art

or Why Google Should Go Ahead And Organize The World...

One of the most hyped parts of an iPod Touch is the "Cover Flow" view. This is supposed to allow me to visually skim through my music library. There's only one problem. Huge portions of my library is missing cover art. And not just because I have "free" music. Most of my music collection is still from CD's the wife and I accumulated over the years. No, iTunes hates collections, movie soundtracks, greatest hits and all sorts of random songs. And of my music with cover art, some of it isn't even the right cover. For the longest time, one of my Green Day albums didn't have cover art. Why do I mention this? Because, Mindy Smith had the missing Green Day art.

So, I started my cover art project. Sometimes, it was as simple as deleting the current wrong cover and having iTunes search again. Sometimes, I had to fix the album title or artist name. Slowly, I found myself with three categories of music still missing covers. 1) Old MP3s missing tons of info. 2) the dreaded "collection" and 3) all my Beatles music.

Today, I made my big leap forward by downloading art from other places and manually matching it with my music. This may seem like a pain, but I wish I had just done this from the begining. It's easy. Go to to a place like Amazon, search for the song/album, save the cover art and then copy it to your album/song info page.

This is the part where Google gets my vote for organizing the world....

Time and time again, Amazon would give me a "can not find" message. I would then google the item in question, only for the top choice to come up as...you've guessed it...Amazon. How can Google index and track info on Amazon's website better than Amazon? That's not a question for Google, but one for Amazon.

Of course, none of this is surprising or important.

No, what's important is that I finally have cover art for Abby Road when I decide to listen to the Beatles.

Which is quite often because Abby Road is - as my niece would say - awesomely awesome!