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More => Old Versions => Media Center 12 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: davecherry on June 09, 2007, 10:20:09 pm

Title: iTunes and cover art
Post by: davecherry on June 09, 2007, 10:20:09 pm

I use iTunes and have have added cover art for all my music.  When I import those songs into MC no cover art appears.  Is there a way to easily retrieve the cover art from iTunes library for use in MC.

My files as AAC, AAC from itunes store and Apple Lossless formats

Title: Re: iTunes and cover art
Post by: benn600 on June 09, 2007, 10:47:34 pm

My question would be: are you switching completely to JR MC?  I would recommend it but it's an important question.  I personally scanned all my cover art in, 1K + CDs.  It took a ton of time, obviously, but now I have nice 1200x1200 resolution cover art files.

This means full screen cover art looks great...however, copying songs to an iPod (or MP3 player) isn't as good because the cover art does not get downsized, so it can easily take 1GB from cover art alone--1MB per file average.

Title: Re: iTunes and cover art
Post by: trott on June 10, 2007, 02:48:16 am

MC does not support reading of all tags in .m4a files. iTunes embeds the cover art into the file and unfortunately it seems this is one of the unsupported tags in MC...
The way I solved it is to have all my cover art embedded but additionallly have it present as a folder.jpg file in album folders. Then configure MC to use both types of cover art...So, for the mp3's it will read the embedded art and for  aac files use the folder.jpg files.

Of course since version 7, if you use the automatic cover art feature of iTunes, it will put the covers in a database instead of embedding it, which makes things a bit more difficult...But all files you tagged yourself or which you bought should be fine.

Title: Re: iTunes and cover art
Post by: bspachman on June 10, 2007, 07:51:32 am

I had the same problem, although I have the 'advantage' of also working cross-platform. I use iTunes on the Macintosh to manage music for my laptop and MC12 to manage it all at home on my home theater pc & iPod. Everything shares the same library. (A giant mix of mp3/m4a/m4p/ape/apl...)

Anyway, there's a wonderful AppleScript called "Save Album Art to Album Folder" that will extract your album art from iTunes, scale it, convert it to jpg/png, and save it anywhere you want. You can find the script here:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php

I don't know if there's a similar thing for the Windows versions of iTunes, but the script works fine for me with all of my mp3/m4a/m4p files, including the new iTunes Plus files....

Best,
Brad