iAlbumArt 1.5 = No Fun

[Tags: iPod, Apple, iTunes, iAlbumArt, Music,
Art]

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Like about a billion other people - this Christmas I recieved an iPod Nano, which I'm enjoying very much. Now that I'm getting my music under control, I decided to utilize the iPods picture functionality and did some searching on some tools that automatically download the pictures in my playlist or Library.

I came across iAlbumArt 1.5 (mailto:iAlbumArt@ipod-sync.com) and am sadly disappointed. It was $11.95 to get the full license and it did integrate very well, installation was fine on Windows XP, and all seemed smooth - until I had a song that wasn't on the Top 100 of All-Time Rock & Roll charts. Actually iAlbumArt 1.5 got confused easily and over 60% of the time, (when using it to automatically search and insert the album art) it put the wrong album art in.

How it works:
iAlbumArt 1.5 works by using the ID3 tag on the song to look for the Artist Name / Album Name and then does a search into Amazon.com for the album. The obvious problem is that when Amazon.com doesn't have the picture, you're out of luck. But I could have lived with just that being the problem.

Here's an example:

Song 1: The Pretenders / Singles
Song 2: The Fix / Ultimate collection
Song 3: Blake Babies / Rosy Jack World


I search under Song 1; my result: Sound Track to Godzilla

Ok - so I do a multiple search which will pull up just the Artist name, and I get lots of Pretenders albums, but not "Singles". So I pick a generic picture.

I search for Song 2: The initial search came up with Duran Duran / Live from London. Don't even ask me how it came up with this. So I do a multiple search - nothing. It's as if the Fixx (an 80's band) didn't exist.

So I do the last one Song 3: This search provided me with the Soundtrack to the movie Perdition. Perdition was set in the 30's and starred Tom Hanks - the Blake Babies (an 80's Indie band with Juliana Hatfield) WOULDN'T be on that movie soundtrack in a thousand years. So I do a multiple search - It only provides me with Juliana Hatfield CD's - no Blake Babies at all. What DID show up in this search was one picture of "The Pretenders: Singles" (Song 1). So, stupidly, I went back to Song 1 and did another multiple search - nope. The Pretenders: Singles didn't show up... again.

So out of about 250 songs, I have approximately 80 that have the correct album art. The rest I had to MANUALLY go in a delete from iAlbumArt 1.5 and then do a second search for each album, which yielded the 80 correct pictures.

THE PROOF



Here's my search for The Fixx




The initial result of "Duran Duran", how it got that from "The Fix" I don't know




Now I do the multiple search looking for any Album Art - with bad results




I search in Google and find the Album Art immediately. *sigh*




Final Thoughts:

iAlbumArt 1.5 is fine if you only listen to popular music of the past 15 to 20 years. If it's the top albums, top songs, the iAlbumArt will probably work fine 80% of the time and you'll have to search around for the other 20%. If you listen to stuff that's outside of the mainstream or wasn't really that popular - don't even waste your time and money. iAlbumArt will not find the covers of your tunes - not only that, it'll find and insert the WRONG album art, making you waste even more time removing the incorrect pictures.

iAlbumArt (it seems) uses 15 year old technology of "boolean" search through Amazon.com. It's high failure rate shows it's not a very good application. While it did install relatively well with no errors, running it while it searches bogs down my computer (An AMD 64-FX with 2GB RAM, WinXP PRO, Ultra 150 SCSI-3 RAID Array HD's, 6MB Cable connection and an ATI 9800 256MB Vid Card). I exceed the requirements of this program by probably 10x yet is sluggishly moves and when automatically searching for a large amount of music art - it can take up to 2 hours or more to find the WRONG stuff. As I mentioned before, it's $11.95, however, my council is to SAVE YOUR MONEY AND DO NOT BUY THIS PROGRAM.

Follow the iTunes directions and do a Google search for your images. Save them into your "My Pictures" folder or make a folder specificially for your iTunes. The pictures you save should be no bigger than 200x200. Assign the pictures in your iTunes and set your iPod to show the pictures when the songs are played. The pictures will take up some space, so keep that in mind.

I wrote Mike Matheson (the copyright owner on iAlbumArt 1.5) with my findings and disappointment. Hopefully, reading this will save you some time and money and hopefully the Mike or whomever will work on the next iteration will solve the many problems of this software.

Overall iAlbumArt 1.5 gets a: