Oh See The...Album Artwork

When Cover Flow was first introduced on iTunes, we were already on our way to collect album art for our collection of music. 'Course we knew that it's not something we would be able to complete that quickly, since we don't really have the time to sit down and hunt for album art all night (admittedly when we do sit down to search for album art we'll be at it till past 3am).

We're rather happy that, in our case, a rough glance on Cover Flow on our iPod Touch shows that album art there is nearly complete save a number of songs.

The thing about album art, and how Apple made it more prominent...it makes ya notice things you lack. So of course we'll notice missing album art whenever we're playing our music, or when we have iTunes on and the list shows a song with no album details etc. Never did we need to bother about these details in the past!

Thankfully, we don't need lyrics for all our songs.

Now, when we do get to sit down and check Amazon UK for album art, it's not always that easy too. The easiest is when we rip off a CD we own, all the details are there (most of the time). If we rip off some lesser-heard of CD like the Death Note soundtrack, or say Tracy's and Ian's He Says/She Says album, we can scan in the artwork (or try and search for it online). Then there's the mainstream music too, those are easy to get album art. We like using the album art where the song first appeared in most of the time.

Trouble begins slightly when we look for album art for the genre oldies/evergreen. Some are so old that they don't have album art. Some are one hit wonders that disappeared. Some will be so popular that we're spoilt for choice deciding which album art to use. We have 'Best of...', 'The Definite Collection of...', '...Gold', 'The Essential Collection of...' and lots more. If we have a few songs, then we've to check to see if the album we're referring to has all the songs rather than use two or three different albums.

Tough ones are the classicals. Since there be some we've gotten from elsewhere, the details of those songs aren't always complete. Which orchestra performed this variation of Canon in D? Who sang that version of Nessun Dorma? And even if we do have the details, it doesn't mean that we know which album it came from.

And then we come to the few Chinese songs we have (we think there's five, excluding our Teresa Tengs). There's one song by Richie Ren (or is it Jen?) and three by Sammi Cheng that we have no idea what the title is. As far as we know it the mp3 file is called 'SAMMI CHENG - Some Catchy Song'. Yes well the Chief could probably tell us the song names and all but we'll solve that when we get to it next time.

We thinks we ought to follow Amiable Aix's suggestion of making our own album art for songs we don't have details for!