Yes, I'm sorry: another album art thread. I did try searching, but there weren't any definitive answers.

Preamble: This is actually for the 3G nano, but should apply to Classic users (and should get more views).
I've got a new nano, my first iPod ever. Album art, and subsequently CoverFlow, are oh so pretty. Unfortunately, the latter is slow to load images (I'm aware 1.0.1 firmware sped this up for the Classic; it's still slow on Nano). Typically when I'm playing a song and head back to CoverFlow, it takes a good couple seconds to let all the covers load up, and I only have about 1600 songs. When I had only 10 albums on to play with, CoverFlow was instantaneous.

So, questions regarding speeding up Cover Flow:

1) Select Tracks > Get Info > Find album .jpg VS. "Get Album Artwork". Does embedding the artwork result in SLOWER loading times than this index that iTunes creates when you use their native artwork retriever? If so, I suppose it would be worth it to perfectly name each artist/album so that iTunes can find the artwork. This should be the best solution for fastest CoverFlow loading time?

2) Optimal size. If embedding vs. indexing has no impact on speed, what is the best resolution for the classic/nano's artwork? Keeping in mind that the "full screen artwork" feature is no longer available, and that I don't care to use CoverFlow within iTunes itself. Would embedding optimally low-sized artwork speed up CoverFlow within the iPod? Presumably if you've got monster 1600x1600 artwork embedding in each track, the iPod has to work a bit harder to parse it out and display it.

3) If I do want to resize all my artwork, does that slider in the Artwork tab when you "Get Info" do anything? I tried resizing via that slider, but it never seemed to have an impact when I went back to look at the artwork. If it does work, do you know what size each interval on the slider represents?

That's it. Sorry for being so loquacious. I hope you get the gist of my concerns.