Hi

I recently found this forum and might soon ask for some advice on setting up what would be my first computer-based music system.

I've seen one or two references here regarding not being able to use cover art in iTunes with wav files, so I thought I'd mention a simple workaround (I'm not suggesting wav is superior to any other format but if you, like me, want to listen to wav files for whatever reason - but like your iTunes album art as well, it can be done).

Use any media editor and create a short file of silence, then save the file as mp3. You only need to do this once. My file is 1ms, or 1/1000 of a second long encoded at 320kbps (the top quality for an mp3 file, for no real reason really considering you can't actually hear the quality of silence :) The file of silence is tiny -- about 8kb -- so I could even email a copy of mine to anyone who wants it but doesn't have a media editor.

So, when you come across an album that isn't in the iTunes store, all you do is copy this mp3 file of silence to the location where the album's wav files are, then in iTunes, select all the files in the album (the mp3 file together with the wav music files) and name the album title, artist etc as you would normally with a group of wav files. Then, select the mp3 file only and attach your cover art (that you've scanned or taken from Google image search or wherever). This works as iTunes only needs the cover art for one file per album - in this case the mp3 file. I normally name the file 00 Cover.mp3 so that for me it's the first track on any album but even if it turns up somewhere in the middle of the album you wouldn't notice a 1ms additional gap between music tracks unless it's a gapless album.

This isn't perfect (for example, if for some reason you like or need to keep an accurate record of the number of songs you have in total, you're adding a "song" of 1/1000s silence to some albums) but it's very quick to do once you've practiced it a couple of times and it does avoid the need to convert to another music file format when you'd prefer wav - just because of cover art. So I thought I'd mention it here.