Every since I got my first iPhone I’ve got a little bit obsessive about having the right album art attached to my MP3s. It makes it easier to see albums when you’re flipping through and it generally makes for a nicer experience. One of the many problems with iTunes is that its album art detection is limited to items in the iTunes Music Store catalogue. Combine this with the fact that it uses the frequently ropey Gracenote database to propogate metadata when you rip a CD and you’ve got a recipe for fustration! While I frequently find myself tidying up Gracenote track listings (misspellings is the most frequent one) I’ve found a very handy site to help with iTMS’s less than comprehensive catalogue – Albumart.org. It seems to get most of it’s data from Amazon listings, so out of print discs can still be hard to find, but for most things its really good, especially when there are multiple versions of an album’s artwork available.
This has proved very useful for my current project – ripping some of my fiance’s CDs for inclusion in our wedding reception disco (hired PA, laptop and iTunes DJ mode) as some of his selections definitely aren’t in the iTMS catalogue!