It’s substantial when you extrapolate through 25,000 songs, of course - about 7,500 MB or 7.5 GB - but on my cushy 1 terabyte drive, I’ve plenty of room to spare. The size differential’s negligible at the individual file level - about a third of a MB per track on average. The downside’s that you can’t take the art with you if you move those files out of your iTunes environment. The upside of this is that your music library’s spared the storage cost associated with duplicating image files for every track. That’s because Apple stores album art in a proprietary file format, then stores those files inside number-sequenced folders with no obvious relationship to their corresponding tracks.
Even then, it’s a trick to manage, say you zap your iTunes library (intentionally or no) or migrate between computers. But the art itself isn’t embedded in the track, it’s actually stored in a folder titled “Album Artwork” within your iTunes directory.
When you click on an iTunes track and select “Get Album Artwork,” iTunes contacts the Apple Store and attempts to match the track with corresponding album art. Re-embed? Doesn’t downloading album art already handle that? Alas, no (or to be fair to those who’d rather not embed album art, “alas it’s not an option to”). ( MORE: Is Music Piracy Really ‘The New Radio’? Yes and No)įortunately, I chanced on a little site called Doug’s AppleScripts while searching for iTunes automation tools, specifically something called “Embed Artwork,” a freebie Apple Script (written by the apparently godlike “Doug”) that can “re-embed artwork downloaded from the iTunes Store into the files of the selected tracks.” (Note: For OS X 10.6 and 10.7 users, you’ll want Doug’s “Re-Embed Artwork” Apple Script, since he admits the original script “does not appear to work in OS X Lion”). What I needed was album art, but nearly 25,000 songs and just shy of 2,000 albums…I’d either have to find a way to automate the process, or plan a week of vacation (or two) parked in front of my flatscreen.
#HOW TO ADD ARTWORK TO ITUNES LISTINGS TV#
Launching songs on my television via Apple TV is just as drab until Cupertino’s default screen-saving melange of lions, rhinos and baby seals pops up to background whatever I’m listening to. Opening Apple’s “Cover Flow” displays a library of identical black boxes, each containing a pair of eighth notes joined by crossbar.
#HOW TO ADD ARTWORK TO ITUNES LISTINGS FREE#
A year ago I opted to convert those songs over from the free lossless audio codec format, or FLAC, to Apple’s lossless alternative, mostly so I could play them in iTunes as well as through other i-devices without fitful hack-arounds, or having to maintain a duplicate library in an agnostic, lossy format like MP3.Īfter the conversion, I realized my collection looked sort of dead, devoid as it’s been of album art - just a mammoth scrolling list of track names and album titles. Starting from zero, it takes iTunes about 20 minutes to add everything to my library, running off a 7200 RPM external hard drive. Follow that time again: When the evil, obsessive-compulsive, mirror-verse me starts picking at piles of disorganized digital information, speaking in sepulchral tones: “Time to get to work, Matt.” This time it’s my iTunes library - not gargantuan at nearly 25,000 songs, but far from modest.
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