How to store iTunes cover art as mp3 id tag?

Question

iTunes shows nice cover arts for all my mp3 songs. Unfortunately most of them are stored in the iTunes data base and not as mp3 id tags. This makes them useless, if I use the mp3 files with other software and devices.

Is there a way to force iTunes to store the cover arts as mp3 id3 tags?

Or is there a software than can automatically search for the missing cover arts and store them in the id3 tags of the mp3 files?

Solution 1

This is the solution I found until now. Since it's very complicated and time consuming I'm still looking for something more convenient.

1. In iTunes, mark the song(s) you don't have a cover art so far and choose "Load Cover Art" from the pop-up Menu. If iTunes has some halfway correct information about the song, it will find matching cover art for almost every song I tried.
2. Now choose "Information" from the pop-up menu. In the dialog, go to the "Cover" tab and click on the cover art. Now you can copy it to the clipboard with "Copy" from the pop-up menu. Then close this dialog.
3. Now select all songs of the same album and again choose "Information" from the pop-up menu. On the "Info" tab, right click on the "Cover" square and choose "Paste". Now you can close the dialog.

This stores the image in the MP3 as an ID3 tag.

Solution 2

You can use one of Doug's Scripts to embed existing artwork from iTunes into MP3 tags.

Solution 3

Mp3tag is a nice free tools that allows you to edit or download meta data including cover art for your MP3 files.

Mp3tag supports online database lookups from, e.g., Amazon, discogs, or freedb, allowing you to automatically gather proper tags and cover art for your music library.

Comments

[Hace]

For the software part of your question: do you use Mac OS X or Windows?

[BetaRide]

I'm on Windows 7. Just added a tag.

[HaydnWVN]

But does it support images within ID3 tags?

[BetaRide]

I think Apple Script is useless on Windows, isn't it?

[Dan Gravell]

Apologies, I missed that. You could try this: sheerboredom.net/guides/45-apple/…

[BetaRide]

Mp3tags is a powerfull ID3 Tag editor. However it didn't find any covers at all. iTunes had no problems to find the covers for the same mp3 files.