album cover mania

Secretly, one of the things that consumes my time when I'm online is looking for album art for the songs on my iTouch. I didn't care much about album art when I had a regular iPod Video, but with the iTouch's swivelly album selection interface, suddenly I am distubed by the blank spots - hence, the quest for all the album covers in existence. I am enslaved by the need for everything to be pretty (sigh).

This addiction began rather innocently. I thought I'd spend an hour and be done with it. But no. Alternate cover from different releases, promotional art, band pictures and such all presented themselves (even the choice of the cover of the single versus the album cover caused great angst). There was also the matter of getting images of sufficiently high resolution (I made the error, early on, of just getting the first image I found, which inevitably was low res, which looked god-awful ugly on the iTouch). Soon, it became an obsession, triggering my powerful collector mentality, especially when I found out that I could have multiple art or images per song.

It also caused me to face the fact that I had too many songs I didn't really care about (why bother looking for the perfect cover for something by The Cocteau Twins when I don't like the song anyway?). Which lead to massive purgings as I trimmed down my library to half (I'm down to around 12G), which still seems excessive to me (but the collector in me cannot give up any more).

I'm almost done, but am now thinking about doing it all over again since the quality of the images are not all the same, and in some cases, I gave in and used the wrong album cover simply because it looked better. I know, I know, but I justify all this puttering around as stress relief (so I don't feel so guilty).