January 27, 2008
2 Dashboard Widgets for Finding Missing Album Art
Hands-on with two Dashboard widgets for iTunes: Amazon Album Art and Album Art Widget. Both can search for and add missing cover art to your iTunes library.
Amazon Album Art
HOW IT WORKS: Type in an artist or title and click the button to search Amazon sites. Click the thumbnails button to review all the search results. When you like what you see, click the "Set as album art in iTunes" button. But BE CAREFUL.The default setting is to operate on the selected (highlighted) track in iTunes, which might not be what you're currently listening to. That makes it easy to accidentally apply the art to the wrong album! Unfortunately, I'm speaking from experience here :( I'd recommend changing the preferences to "operate on the current album" if you plan to use it while listening to your iTunes library. Clicking on the cover art itself takes you to the album's page at Amazon.com. NOTE: iTunes must be running before you can apply any artwork.
Another preference allows you to choose between searching Amazon's "Popular Music" or "Classical Music" sections. In addition, you can specify an international Amazon site search: (.at, .ca, .co.jp, .co.uk, .de, .fr).
OPINION: Works well as a handy Dashboard widget for quickly searching the various Amazon sites for missing album art. It functioned fine on my laptop running Tiger OS. Just make sure you apply the cover to the right album - check those preferences! The widget does appear to select the largest size available at Amazon, but it would be nice to see pixel dimensions of the search results.
free download page | developer site
Album Art Widget
HOW IT WORKS: Displays cover of the currently playing track. If none is available it can be set to auto-search from various Amazon sites, Google images or yesasia. If you like what it finds, click the "Add artwork to iTunes song" button. Doing so brings up 3 button options: 1-save to song only, 2-save to all songs in the album, and 3-cancel. In addition to the album art features, the widget also lets you rate the currently playing song, displays album tracks (did not work for me), can show you the source page for the searched cover image.
OPINION: Worked well for me, but the cover display is pretty small and the image seemed overly blurred. The ability to rate songs is nice, this widget certainly has more functionality than the Amazon one. Unfortunately the track listing feature didn't work for me.
free download page | developer site
If you're a real widget lover, one of these may be for you. However, broader searches and more options are available with other album art software programs.
