Random Thoughts

Adding Album Art to a podcast

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I’m writing this to share with others as it took me way to long to find the answer on how to do this.

I’ve got two podcasts; On Deck and Gourmet Geeks that are syndicated via iTunes (here and here). I noticed that when you download them to your iPod that the Album Art wasn’t coming through so I did a little research.

I use PodPress on a WordPress install and thought (wrongly) that the Album Art for podcasts was picked up via the RSS feed like everything else in iTunes. But the Album Art actually comes from the ID3 tag on an mp3 file.

Confused? Yeah this is a bit geekie.

What is a ID3 Tag?

ID3 is a very popular audio file data tagging format in active use by
software and hardware developers around the world. ID3 tags are
supported in software such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, YME, MusicMatch and hardware players like the iPod, Creative Zen, Toshiba Gigabeat and Sony Walkman.

tag editor tabSo I learned something new. Didn’t even know that this existed. So basically within a mp3 file you can store some date within the ID3 tag. One use for the tag is the Album Art.

So in order to get your Album Art to show up you need to have it embedded into the mp3 file. How do you do this?

You download a ID3 tag editor. I downloaded and installed AudioShell which works really well on my PC. It adds itself to the right-click preferences function. So you can right-click on a mp3 file and as the image shows to the left, add your album art right there into the ID3 tab.

I’m not sure how you add information to the ID3 tag on a Mac. But if someone could point me in the right direction in the comments I’d appreciate it.

I started blogging in 2005 and found it such a powerful way to reflect and share my thinking about technology, this generation, and how we prepare students for their future not our past.

11 Comments

  1. I use two programs
    iEatBrainz found on version tracker
    and
    metaX, which I found on mp3machine.com

  2. On a Mac (or Windows), drag the MP3 into iTunes. From there you can do Command-I (Ctrl-I) for “Get Info.”

    Go to the “Artwork” tab and add your art as well as toggling all the other things like “remember playback position” and “skip when shuffling,” etc.

    Drag the file back out of iTunes and upload to your host!

    • Thanks Scott!

      I’ll try this again on my PC. I tried before following some directions about how you can copy and paste a .jpg in as Album Art but i couldn’t get it to work on my laptop.

      Stay tuned!

  3. I love having album art too. I must must have my album art for every thing in my ipod. Podcast, movies, tv shows and music too 🙂

  4. Many thanks for the info.
    I’d been scratching my head for some time wondering why Podpress didn’t put the album art in Itunes

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  6. I know its a while since someone posted a comment on here, but wanted to say thanks, very useful post, helped me out instantly.

  7. Awesome! Now I’ll just have to re-upload all of my 50+ meg files to my webhost so they can have cover art in iTunes.
    Thanks for making everything so fast and easy, Apple!

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