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Now that you have imported your music into iTunes, the final step is to add relevant information to each song, such as brand name, year recorded, composer, genre and any other information you wish. This information is saved as part of each song file, so if you ever wish to import your music into a music player program other than iTunes, the information will still be there.

Adding artwork to each of your songs will greatly increase the interest of your music library and will re-create the feeling of having the actual LP jackets in front of you. It will also allow you to to use Cover Flow view, a great way of browsing your music, in both iTunes and on your iPod or iPhone.

Google is your friend

You can often find the relevant cover art through a Google image search. type the name of the album in quotes, followed by the name of the band. This will often bring up the exact album cover your looking for. If this doesn’t work, try doing a regular Google search and clicking on some of the links that come up.

Scanning cover art.

But sometimes you just can’t find the album jacket online. Maybe a musician is too obscure, or the album title, like “great music from the movies” is too generic. In such cases, a scanner or multifunction device comes in mighty handy.

Since album jackets are printed through a process called halftoning, you should be sure to set the de-screening option in your scanning software. Halftoning is a process by which all the shades of the spectrum are simulated through the use of tiny printed dots. However, since your computer screen is also made of tiny dots called pixels, and since the dots of the halftone don’t usually match those of the screen, you get weird patterns called moire. This is corrected for by the de-screening algorithm of your scanning software, which smooths and blurs together the halftone dots in the final scan.

Tim Arends covers all aspects of converting LPs into MP3s on his webpage at

http://www.squidoo.com/record-lps-onto-cds

Including why you should do it, what you need to begin, how to choose a turntable or how to test it if you already have one, whether you need a preamp, how to connect a turntable to your PC, what kind of cables you need, how to use the free audio recording software Audacity, how to split your LPs into separate tracks, how to import your songs into iTunes, how to find cover art online or how to scan it if it’s not available, and how to enjoy your ripped LP music in iTunes.