IArtwork downloads album art in Itunes

[Osiris]

Description: IArtwork is an Itunes add-on that scans your Itunes library for available album art. It can then either downloads all missing album art en-masse and/or allow you to manage individual album instances individually.
Although Itunes is equipped to download album art, it requires you to have an ITunes account and be logged in order to download album art. It also tends to be extremely picky about how the music is tagged if it is to download album art at all. And even if you get the album art downloading to function properly, you still need to manually flip through all of the albums individually to search and download album art, which requires quite a bit of work on the part of the user.

What IArtwork can do, on the other hand, is scan you library for all album artwork, download all missing album art sequentially, and display everything in a list. The user can then go down the list and individually intervene/edit any entry that may have been processed incorrectly and/or attempt to manually locate/identify albums whose album art was not found automatically. Here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: clicking on the IArtwork shortcut will launch both IArtwork and Itunes. It will present you with a “you have x albums with no artwork message”, and give you the option find/update them.
• En-masse editing: you can scroll down a list of album art and optionally remove the album art or manually intervene/change the available album art. The list allows is a very good way to quickly go over your entire music collection and fix/edit it (see first screenshot above).
• Manual intervention: clicking on an individual entry will open a dialog where you can adjust the search string, flip through the results, and hone in on the correct album art which was not automatically found. Works very well.
• Artwork downloading source: the artwork is downloaded from Amazon.com (update: previously this was unknown to me but the developers were kind enough to email me and let me know).
• Resource utilization: the task manager has this process as using a whopping 96 megs of memory, which is simply way too much. I'm not sure how this can be the case; my guess is that it is simply inefficient in its memory use because it is still in beta. Regardless, you can simply use this software once, fix your collection, and not use it again until you need to (i.e. it doesn't need to be always present, consuming resources).

The verdict: this is a perfect plugin for quickly managing album art in Itunes. It is similar to another one previously reviewed on Freewaregenius (Itunes Art Importer), but this latter one is no longer in development, and IArtwork is much more straightforward and simpler to use. Moreover, IArtwork has a clear edge in that it processes your entire music library at once, rather than forcing you to process each album seperately. If you have an Ipod or Iphone and would like to fix your album artwork, IArtwork might be exactly what you've been looking for.

IArtwork downloads album art in Itunes Review & Download Link | freewaregenius.com