Oct
01
2011

coverArt Project

iTunes Album Art Problems Solved

(Add / View Comments) (0)Saturday, October 1, 2011 - 06:34:40 pm
(Posted Under: Geek, iTunes)
We'll, there's another iTunes annoyance solved. The annoyance of album art that comes from the iTunes store. Many of the albums I own don't exist on the iTunes store. And for some reason iTunes matches completely different covers in some instances. I've had at least 3 different album covers come up for Satellite's self titled disc over the years. At one point it was the artwork for P.O.D's record entitled Satellite. I know, crazy.

The issue of course can be solved by embedding artwork into an MP3's ID3 tags. I'm sure millions of people are happy to do that. I'm not one of them. There is something innately stupid about storing the same data/information multiple times (ie: for every track on an album). I'll have none of it. Especially since iTunes has a mechanism for storing a single album cover if it exists in the store. Plus, my music collection resides on a right protected samba share, which iTunes (by design) does not have write access to.

A few years ago I had the idea of developing a proxy server to return my own artwork to iTunes. The end result of my playing around was that it wasn't something could get working in a short amount of time, and had too much going on to commit to making it work.

However, it seems that I wasn't the only one who had this idea. Last week I came across this project on GitHub that implements what I never got around to doing - a proxy server for delivering your own artwork to iTunes to use. coverArt.

This is just beautiful and works a treat. This weekend I made a few modifications to the code, and then got the majority of artwork on my iPhone fixed up. Updating the artwork for the 10,000+ songs on my iPod is going to be an ongoing project. As well as developing a bunch of my own customizations, including locally saving artwork and integration with Hitter.

And this is what success looks like. No more P.O.D album covers, no weird covers for other bands called Satellite I've never heard of. Perfect.

Switch Styles

About Style Switching.

!Weblog Index

Sep October 2011 Nov
SU MO TU WE TH FR SA
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30

Categories

RSS FeedRSS Feed