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Here's an iTunes feature I didn't even know existed until a coworker stumbled across it and asked me about it. It involves iTunes album artwork, which I originally found fairly pointless. Lately, though, I've been adding artwork to my iTunes songs. It takes up more space, sure, but not enough to make a difference on my 30GB 5G iPod.

Unfortunately, I guess I've been doing it the wrong way to take advantage of this feature. To keep the file size down, I've using Photoshop to shrink the dimensions of the artwork to about 200x200, which is certainly large enough to look good on the iPod itself. But this was before I knew that iTunes could print the artwork and track listing for me—complete with crop marks. But, perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's first look at what iTunes does.

Whenever you buy a track from the iTunes Music Store, the album/single cover comes attached to your music file. You can see this artwork in the bottom left corner of iTunes...

...or by selecting Get Info (Command+I) on the track and choosing either the Summary or Artwork tabs):

You can also add your artwork by dragging an image into the Artwork window, or by selecting Get Album Artwork from the Advanced menu option. This is kind of a crap shoot, however, as I've found iTunes often can't find artwork for many albums, and can pull in some pretty shoddy looking images. I therefore recommend getting the artwork yourself if you're acquiring the songs from a source other than the iTunes Music Store. (Search for the artist and album name in Google, then click on the Images link. You'll usually find yourself with many options from which to choose.) If you have a lot of album covers to retrieve, there are many third party freeware/shareware programs that do a good job of this. I won't cover them here, but many options are linked below.

If you're going to be adding the artwork yourself, I recommend at least 500x500 images at 72 dpi. Even this is too small to look really good in print, but there's a trade-off; the larger the image, the more space it will take up on your iPod (if you intend to transfer them there). What you'll want to do is find something that looks okay when printed, but won't add too much clutter. If you're going to use the artwork specifically for printing CD covers and have no plans to copy it to your iPod, then you can focus entirely on quality and not on file size.

However you get your artwork into iTunes, the features remain the same. You can print a CD jewel case insert, a song listing or an album listing. The available themes will automatically adjust depending upon your selection. Song and album listings are just that, albeit with the ability to print thumbnails of album covers, so I'm going to focus strictly on cover artwork for albums/playlists, here. I mention playlists because if you want to print just the songs on a particular album, you have to create a playlist for that album. Just selecting a track from your library will give you that track's cover, but it's going to list every single song in your library as being a part of that album. I can't imagine ELO would be too happy about having The Dead Milkmen's "Watching Scotty Die" show up on their greatest hits.

So, you've got your songs in the playlist. Now, just select any song in that playlist, and chose Print... from the File menu. Click the CD Jewel Case Insert button, then view the Theme options:

• Text Only - Prints the album title and artist on the lower right of the outer cover, and the track listing and song times on the inner cover, both against a solid color.
• Mosaic - Only for use if you're printing songs with multiple covers, as with comp CDs. In that case, it tiles the album covers in the playlist on the outer cover, and again on the inner cover but faded out to allow the track listing to show. If you have just one cover here, it's the same as printing Single Cover (see below).
• White Mosaic - Same as Mosaic, above, but the inner cover is the song listing on a strictly white background.Single Cover - Perfect for printing a complete album. The full album artwork appears on the outer cover, and a screened version appears on the inner cover with the track listing printed overtop.
• Text Only (Black & White) - Same as Text Only, but both the inner and outer covers are strictly black text on a white background.
• Mosaic (Black & White) - Same as Mosaic, but the outer cover is in grayscale and the inner cover is black text on a white background.
• Single Side - Outer cover is the track listing in black and white. There is no inner cover, and no artwork.
• Large Playlist - If you've got a lot of songs in this particular playlist, you can select this to force up to 151 titles and artists to appear across the outer and inner covers.

This is all very handy, and the final products are surprisingly good. iTunes does a great job of selecting colors based on the actual cover being printed. When printing a Single Cover of my ELO comp, iTunes pulled the dominant blue from the actual cover and used it for the screen on the inner cover with the track listing.

When printing my Madness comp, it pulled the black, but was smart enough to switch the track listing type color to white.

When printing Crooked Still's "Shaken by a Low Sound," iTunes put black text on top of the dominant yellow/green of the album cover.

This isn't a perfect science, however. iTunes is just making educated guesses, and so you sometimes get their type on the inner cover conflicting with the screened artwork of the outer cover. The result can be messy.

A way around this—and something you may want to consider for your comp playlists, anyway—is to select your own artwork. Because iTunes allows to import whatever artwork you like (using the drag and drop method described above), it's very easy to customize your covers. Are you making a CD of love songs for your girlfriend? Just add the songs to your playlist, then change the artwork of the first song to a photo of you and your girlfriend. Highlight that track before selecting Print, and there you go. What a thoughtful boyfriend you are...and it'll make her less likely to keep your CD after you split up, saving you grief from the RIAA.

Printing album artwork really is as simple as that. Why Apple doesn't promote features such as this more often, I can't say. But, that's why we're here. Be sure to come back to Applelinks for more hidden features and tips on how get the most of your iApps. If you have other tips and programs to share, mention them in our comments area.

iTunes Artwork programs:

• Corripio (freeware)
• GimmeSomeTune (freeware)
• Export Artwork (shareware)
• CoverScout (shareware)
• Album Cover Finder (shareware)
• Album Art Thingy (shareware)
• MPFreaker (shareware)
• Curator (shareware)
• iTunesCool (shareware)
• Utilitunes (shareware)
• iTunes Album Artwork Locator (shareware)
• GetArtwork (freeware)