From iTunes to Winamp: album art transfer
March 16, 2010 in album art by Dan Gravell
Why don't they make things easy for us?I've heard a lot of good things about Winamp and wanted to try out some of the interesting music library information features. I decided to transfer a small iTunes music library into Winamp to give it a go.
The album art in my iTunes library was reasonably complete. I say reasonably... well it wasn't totally satisfactory:
Four out of six ain't bad... I suppose...
I had already set up an iTunes Store account and so some of the album art had been found and displayed. Unfortunately this didn't include music not in the iTunes store, such as my rarer albums. I decided to see if Winamp would use my existing art and maybe even fill in the blanks.Album art is found in the iTunes Store ONLY
So now it was time to install Winamp and take a look. I installed it, started it up and fantastic! It recognised I had an iTunes library and offered to import it. "Great", I thought, "this will import all my art too".
Now, the reality: this is what I got:
One out of six is a lot worseAlas, the import was not all it could've been. After importing my iTunes library I was greeted with one measly album art cover. The rest of my albums displayed an unwelcome although initially humorous monochrome image of a llama.
Earlier I gave you the main rule for finding album art in iTunes. Now there's the rule for managing album art in iTunes:
Album art is not stored in your music collection, art is stored in the iTunes databaseThis makes transferring album art from iTunes elsewhere difficult. So: time to break out the big guns. I installed bliss, pointed it at the same music library, and told it to manage my album art.
A few seconds later, bliss had found and installed all four of the mainstream releases, fully automatically, and had found the correct art for the remaining two releases, for which it asked for my confirmation to install (presumably it found them on Google and so wasn't totally sure they were correct).
Six out of six!I restarted Winamp and, joy of joys, the album art bliss had found was visible:
Sometimes the journey is more interesting than the destinationI'm not sure why Winamp won't import album art from iTunes, and I don't know why when it can look up some of my albums it can't find other equally mainstream releases. What I did find out was how bliss helps you transfer your iTunes library to other players. Now, back to listening to the music...
