How does iTunes make its decision as to what artwork to provide

album-artitunes

I'm trying to download Album Art by right-clicking a track in iTunes and choosing Get Album Artwork. Sometimes this works fine, but sometimes iTunes finds the wrong Album.

As an example, I have A Taste Of Things To Come from the Mortal Kombat Soundtrack.:

Album art from *Mortal Kombat Soundtrack*

But this is the only track on that same album with Album Art, so I ask iTunes to Get Album Art for the second track. This is what it finds:

Quigley Soundtrack

The Quigley soundtrack, starring Gary Busey and Oz Perkins.

How does iTunes make its decision as to what artwork to provide for any given track? And ideally, how can I encourage iTunes to make better choices?

I'm running iTunes 10.6.0.40 on a Windows 7 PC.

Best Answer

Clearly, the database being polled either has errors or the mix of the data used to determine the track listing isn't uniquely specified which leads to the errors.

Here is what you have in your control:

  1. Manually override these artworks by hand or by using a competing service. There are many and I've never found them to be worthwhile for the music I have issues with. YMMV of course and I know several people really love these iTunes add-on programs and cleaners.
  2. The metadata - you can edit the title or the author or any of the other music tag information on the problematic tracks to better match what Apple sells the music. If you have a Jimmy Buffet album labeled "stoner rock" for genre - perhaps changing it to "Rock" would be the difference in retrieving the correct artwork.

As you can see, the details aren't public, so some trial and error may be needed. If you have the actual CD and can re-encode them, usually this gets the data correct for matching with artwork.

Related Question