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badtz · Sep 13, 2006, 02:08 AM

For some reason, after iTunes finds album art for the songs on my playlists, where does it store this information?

I thought it stored it in each music file themselves, but what I did was I erased the album art on the file after the download, and the file size for the mp3 didn't go down.

While when I added album art manually, it DID make the size go up, and down when I took it off.

Odd.

Any info on how this works? Where it's stored?

threestain · Sep 13, 2006, 02:37 AM

ummm... mine doesn't seem to want to add any album art - do I have to leave it for a week or soemthing? nothing new has turned up despite repeatedly asking it for new stuff!

MaxPower2k3 · Sep 13, 2006, 11:53 AM

If iTunes downloads it, it puts it in a separate database (~/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork). This is the database needed for CoverFlow to work. If there is artwork stored in the music file itself, it's copied and put in the CoverFlow database. When iTunes downloads artwork, though, it just goes into the database and not into the file. This has advantages and disadvantages (Doesn't add unnecessary size to your library, but also is not available for Spotlight to use, etc.).

If you're adding artwork manually, it will be added to both the song file and the CoverFlow database. As far as I know, there's no way to add it to just the database (such as dragging an image onto an empty album cover, which was possible with the original CoverFlow) but you can add it to just the first song and it will copy it and put it in the database.

Sorry, kind of a complicated post. I hope they make the process simpler in future versions... the artwork downloader seems quite buggy, getting some covers on one try and others on another.

Mithras · Sep 13, 2006, 11:58 AM

If the artwork goes into the database but not the file, wouldn't that imply it wouldn't transfer to the iPod? Or is the artwork database also transferred?

MaxPower2k3 · Sep 13, 2006, 12:08 PM

Originally Posted by Mithras

If the artwork goes into the database but not the file, wouldn't that imply it wouldn't transfer to the iPod? Or is the artwork database also transferred?

Yeah, my guess is that the iPod uses a similar database now. It really makes sense there because the database only takes up maybe a hundred megs or so for a ~30GB Library, but if those images were in every song file, it can add upwards of a gigabyte to the size of the library.

Dakar · Sep 13, 2006, 12:27 PM

SO does mean we can no longer add artwork to the actual file?

Scott-G · Sep 13, 2006, 12:49 PM

If the album art is kept in a seperate cache does it get deleted the same way as before? If I had a song with the embedded artwork and iTunes copied it to the database do both instances get deleted when I do a get info of the song and delete the artwork?

The reason I ask is over the last couple weeks in anticipation of getting a new iPod when they came out I went and downloaded a lot of artwork off of google. Most were 200x200 or 300x300 pixles. Now iTunes will download available artwork at what appears to be 500x500 pixles, however if I already have artwork it doesn't replace it.

Now I want to remove my old art and have iTunes download new stuff.

Thanks,
Scott

TETENAL · Sep 13, 2006, 01:02 PM

Originally Posted by Scott-G

Now I want to remove my old art and have iTunes download new stuff.

You can select multiple songs, Get Info on them and delete the covers for all of them. I did this with one album, of which I checked that it is available in the iTS, and it didn't download the covers.

Had to put in the old album art again. So sometimes it works, sometimes not. I say it's not worth the trouble if you already have covers on your existing songs. It's just convenient that for newly ripped albums it saves you from visiting walmart.com.

MaxPower2k3 · Sep 13, 2006, 01:36 PM

Originally Posted by Scott-G

If the album art is kept in a seperate cache does it get deleted the same way as before? If I had a song with the embedded artwork and iTunes copied it to the database do both instances get deleted when I do a get info of the song and delete the artwork?

The reason I ask is over the last couple weeks in anticipation of getting a new iPod when they came out I went and downloaded a lot of artwork off of google. Most were 200x200 or 300x300 pixles. Now iTunes will download available artwork at what appears to be 500x500 pixles, however if I already have artwork it doesn't replace it.

Now I want to remove my old art and have iTunes download new stuff.

Thanks,
Scott

you could make a smart playlist of, say, all tracks that are not Track #1, and delete the artwork for all of those. As long as at least one song in the album has the artwork, it should load it into the CoverFlow database for the whole album.

(I would test it on a couple of albums first before you do all of them. It should work fine, but the whole CoverFlow/downloading part of iTunes 7 seems to still have a few kinks to work out)

badtz · Sep 14, 2006, 04:44 AM

Hopefully there's a way in the future to get around adding the art to the first song of every album, and instead only have it sit in the database and not the files themselves. I would prefer to not bulk up the files and have it cached locally instead.

biscuit · Sep 15, 2006, 03:31 AM

Hi Guys. So how do you get the CoverFlow artwork over to your iPod? I note that someone above mentions that their artwork was transferred, but none of it is showing up for me.

This is a real shame because I'd really like to have all the artwork on my iPod. I very nearly bought CoverScout the day before the annoucements.

biscuit

vapspwi · Sep 15, 2006, 10:16 AM

Originally Posted by biscuit

Hi Guys. So how do you get the CoverFlow artwork over to your iPod? I note that someone above mentions that their artwork was transferred, but none of it is showing up for me.

Well, on my (older) 5G, I made sure "show album art" was checked for the iPod (I think this is down in the iPod settings, and I think it was checked by default. Then I deleted a couple of albums from the iPod and transferred them from iTunes to the iPod again (after downloading album art from iTunes Store). (I manually populate my iPod - I'm not sure what happens if you have auto-sync enabled.)

When I did this, the re-transferred albums now had album art displayed (though it did take a few seconds for the cover to pop up next to the track info).

Hope that helps.

JRjr

badtz · Nov 11, 2006, 05:49 PM

has anyone found out a solution to this?