Where does iTunes 7 cover art come from?

Unlike Mark, I dig iTunes 7. Not only is Coverflow cool eye candy, but it’s made it more fun for me to browse my music collection. With coverflow you can randomly flip through your album collection and pick out something you haven’t listened to in a while, without the soul-sucking drudgery of scrolling through a giant list of text.

I do have a question though: where is iTunes finding its cover art? The most obvious answer to that question would be “it downloads cover art from the iTunes music store”, but I’m seeing some cases where that doesn’t seem to be the case. For example, I have in my music collection Cat Power’s “Moon Pix” and Joanna Newsom’s “The Milk-Eyed Mender”, both of which are available in the iTunes store, but iTunes can’t seem to find the cover art (and yes, they’re tagged correctly). On the other hand, I have Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, which definitely isn’t in the iTunes store, and it had no trouble displaying that cover art. Actually, now that I think about it, the Grey Album probably has the cover art embedded in the mp3s, so that would explain it.

Anybody else seeing inconsistent behavior with iTunes 7 and album covers?

Update: Today I tried downloading the cover art for those albums again, and it worked. Must have been an glitch with the iTunes store.

Posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 2:12 pm.