Since my new iPod Touch requires that I use iTunes (which is, incidentally, incompatible with Vista x64!), I've had to scrap my use of Anapod Explorer (note: unlike what the site says, it really is not compatible with all iPod models on the market). Unfortunately, I really hate iTunes. I've worked extremely hard to prevent it and QuickTime from being installed on my PCs over the years, but with the omission of disk mode from the iPod Touch and the iPhone, I've had to suck it up. That doesn't mean I need it to be my music player, though -- just my iPod sync tool.
Unfortunately, my music collection has been mostly ripped through Windows Media Player (okay, not "unfortunately" because I like it, but since iTunes won't use it). So only the few songs I've managed to buy through the iTunes online store (on my iPod itself) get album art:
But now, thanks to Chris Clark and his blogging friend Colin Devroe, I've found a way to get (generally OK results with) my album artwork for everything. As he says:
1.) Open iTunes
2.) Select every song in your Music library
3.) Right-click and select “Get Info”
4.) Click YES or OK to the warning about editing multiple tracks
5.) Select the checkbox next to “Album Art” (making sure the box is empty)
6.) Click OK
Once this process is completed - and it takes a long time (took about 20 minutes on my laptop with ~1300 songs) - with all your music still selected, click on the Advanced menu, and choose Get Album Artwork. For me this got about 80% of the artwork, and two of the albums were wrong, but it was fairly accurate and a good time saver. Kind of lame that iTunes won't let you get album artwork without this unless you bought the album, considering that WMP will just try to do it. (Most of the artwork that I had to put in manually came from my WMP music folders). I did have to delete all the music from my iPod and re-sync, which was kind of lame. But the results were definitely worthwhile:
Good times! Thanks to Chris and Colin for the tip!