I Know The Guy Who Owns This Place

Years ago, I built the majority of my digital music library under Microsoft’s Windows Media Player (WMP). Since then, I’ve switched to Mac and iTunes as my digital media of choice.

Generally, importing your MP3 music folders created by Windows Media Player into iTunes on the Mac works just great. Pretty much all the track data stays intact… except every track is missing it’s album art! That wasn’t a big deal for a while, but now that all my various devices (iPod, iPhone, Squeezebox) display that art while playing it’s become a more glaring issue.

So I decided to try to fix it.

I Guess I Could Update Them All Manually?

Obviously, I could manually go into each folder, find those files in iTunes and add the folder.jpg file as the album art. But I’ve got 100+ folders that I’d have to do it on. Not an optimal plan.

There’s Got To Be a Better Way….

Unfortunately, after much Googling, I was unable to find a good utility or script that did something like this. I was actually surprised how little code there seems to be out there for shoving local image files into an iTunes track. There were a couple scripts that download from the web and one that saves from iTunes to your hard drive. But nothing really that close to what I needed.

I’ve got to give a shout out to Doug Adam and his site, Doug’s Applescript for iTunes. It’s a heck of a resource for music management scripts.

So armed with the courage ignorance brings, I decided to write an iTunes utility in Applescript that looks for a folder.jpg file in the track’s location and, if needed, puts that art into the track in iTunes.

If It Was That Easy, Someone Would Have Done It.

I figured it’d be a quick hour or two to crank out. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t. iTunes doesn’t just let you take a jpg and push it into the MP3 track. I ended up having to convert the folder.jpg to a PICT and then load the PICT file data directly into the album artwork.

I did get it all to work in the end.

Well since I’d come this far, I figured I should go the extra mile and make it “real.” I cleaned up the code, tested it for bugs as best I could, and added a couple features that I thought others would like. I’ve never released software personally before; hopefully I put it all together correctly.

Download It Now

Hopefully there are other folks stuck in a similar boat as I was and could use this utility. I’m releasing it here for other folks who might find it a time saver:

Download iTunes_Set_Track_Location_FolderJPG_as_Album_Art.zip (37 kb)

You can run this either with selected tracks in iTunes or you can choose a playlist of tracks to update. It checks whether you want to just add missing art or override the track’s current album art. It tries to log what happened on every track it tried to update in case you hit a problem.

This software is provided as-is, with no warranty or support. I generally tried to make sure the code erred on the side of no changes to your tracks except on success, but I can’t guarantee that.

If you do run into an issue, let me know via @bryanselner on Twitter. I don’t promise to get time to fix it, but I’d like to know and will certainly try.

One parting thought… If this script saves you tons of time and energy or gets you jump-started on your own project, won’t you leave me a tip for the help?

~ by bryan on March 7, 2010.