Walked down to the 5th Avenue Apple Store earlier today. They had both the Classic and the Nano.

Covers aren'y usually a problem - if iTunes can't find them then search for the album title on Google images ( make sure you view them full size - anything over 300 x 300 pixels is OK) them just highlight all the tracks on the album in iTunes and then drag the image from Google into the image place holder in iTunes.

Sounds more complicated than it really is - all my tracks have an album cover associated (even the weird stuff that I like to listen to).

I think I have in excess of 400 CDs ripped .... to go back know and add all that is not going to happen. I believe there are tools that add it based on images on amazon, that could work. But without, is not that great.

@jk1002: there are quite some plugins for itunes that will do that for you. i also ripped a lot of cd's and had the same problem. Depending if you are using a mac or a pc you need different software. A good idea is to go to versiontracker.com and do a search there for itunes and cover, i am sure you will find something.

 

@peacha: what's wrong with you? 

iTunes finds the covers for you! Get an iTunes store music account (you don't have to spend any money there, I haven't), and then sign in in the 'Store' area of iTunes. Then go into Preferences and tick the box which says 'Automatically download missing artwork'. It's generally very good. Keeps my ~9000 song library uniform with nice high quality album art.

I USED to have to add everything manually, but that became a pain. Since Apple added the functionality to find album art automatically, things got a lot easier.

It is not that great! It has labelled a couple of my albums with the wrong artwork and it is very difficult to replace!!

I agree with Peter. I switched it off, as lots of my music was identified with the wrong covers.

Replacing isn't that hard, Peter. Select the tracks in question, and press command+i. You'll open a window with Multiple Item Information. Drag the correct artwork into the Artwork square. If there's already a cover there, this will be replaced. Sometimes, when you open command+i, you get a window with more options, just select track listings.
 

Thanks! I'll try that! The program also does not identify many classical albums which make up at least half of my 16,000 tracks.

Brilliant! I had been pasting into the box at the left hand side which wouldn't save! Joan Armatrading was sick of being Gloria Gaynor!!!!

It doesn't work at all for most of my music. I have a lot of CDs from very small labels that are not in the Itunes store and therefor no cover via Itunes update function.

Sometimes I don't use the "official" cover. It's quite nice to play with the coverflow function - I add photos of the performing artists, or images that link to composers, place of performance, etc. Makes for a very interesting flow to the images when I'm playing music, particularly when I have the image up on the flatscreen and I'm playing random tracks.

If you use a mac this is an excellent widget to get album art. I completed all mine using a combination of this and amazon pics:

 http://www.liquidx.net/albumartwidget/
 

and command+I as noted above makes it very easy to edit your covers 

I've also had some problems with Album Art, but not in iTunes, only on my iPod. Somehow, the front cover for Geogaddi has been randomly splattered across my library, and hence some of my Marvin Gaye collection shares it's cover with Geogaddi. I'm formatting my iPod right now to transfer everything across again though.