I listen to a lot of indie music and so have a lot of songs that were released as singles and have their own album artwork. I always use the list view that displays album artwork on the left. I also combine a lot of the singles that I have into albums which I use to sort them. iTunes seems to randomly choose one of their artworks to display as the artwork for the entire album, is there any way I could set one artwork for the album and also have separate artwork for the individual songs?
ITunes Album Artwork
album-artitunes
Related Solutions
Yes, you can do this a few different ways depending on whether you want to preserve the current artwork or are OK overwriting it.
Way 1 — Simple if you are OK overwriting the current artwork.
- Select all of the songs you would like to share the same album artwork.
- Type Command-I.
- You may see a dialog asking "Are you sure you want to edit information for multiple items?" if so click, "Yes" to continue.
- You will see a editor like this:
- Drag the image you want as the album artwork for these songs onto the well labeled Artwork.
- Click OK and you're done.
Way 2 — If you want to preserve the current artwork.
iTunes allows songs to have multiple artwork files associated with them. It displays the first artwork file as the album art for a particular song. Here's the slightly more painful way you could add your artwork to these songs.
- In the main iTunes window make sure that you have the small album art window displayed in the lower left. You can toggle it's visibility by clicking the icon near the bottom left that looks like this:
- Select the songs you want to add art to.
- Drag your new art onto the cover in the lower left.
- Your art has been appended to the end of the stack of images associated with this file.
- Now the annoying part: you have to open the info panel for each file by selecting it and hitting Command-I.
- For each file move the new image to the top of the stack to make it the default album image and click OK.
- Once you complete step 5&6 for each file you're done.
Check out this AppleScript from the excellent dougscripts.com: Re-Embed Artwork v.1.0. If that doesn't do it for you, you may find something else useful on that site.
Note: I haven't run this script myself and can't vouch for its efficacy, though I believe its source is well-regarded. Use at your own risk.
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Best Answer
No, iTunes and related apps use the artwork from the initial track of each album. Yes, it is frustrating. And no, it is not worth retagging your songs to pretend each of the tracks is its own album.
I asked what is essentially the same question over here:
https://superuser.com/questions/11081/how-can-i-force-front-row-to-show-me-single-artwork-instead-of-album-artwork
In case you want to ask Apple to add this feature, here is the feedback page for iTunes: http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html