Album artwork missing - Subsonic & iTunes music folder

[patrickhenry]

Hi - I'm just getting started with Subsonic and so far things are going pretty well as far as playing music goes. However, I am not seeing album artwork when I launch the local web player or when I use the iSub iPhone app.

I have Subsonic pointed at my iTunes music folder, which is on an external firewire drive. I believe that all of the album artwork is stored by iTunes as .itc files. So far, the only thing I've tried is to add a second media folder, which is the iTunes Album Artwork folder (located on the Mac Mini's internal hard drive, not on the firewire drive). That didn't seem to improve things any.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[BKKKPewsey]

As far as I am aware SS will not read itc files as they are proprietary iTunes files.
Have you added that file type to SS (Settings/General - cover art files)?
As I doubt that will work you need to be able to extract the artwork and place it the appropriate folder as an industry standard image file eg jpg, gif etc.

[patrickhenry]

OK, thank you very much.

[hakko]

From inside iTunes, you can:

bring up the info window about a single mp3 file
go to the artwork tab - iTunes will show the artwork it's using here. select the image and press cmd+c (copy)
close the info window
select the whole album (all mp3 files) and bring up the info window for all of them
select the artwork box, and press cmd+v (paste)
press ok
the iTunes artwork now gets written as embedded artwork to all of your mp3 files and will be displayed in Subsonic / on an ipod etc

[patrickhenry]

OK, thanks! I will see how that goes.

[patrickhenry]

Thanks for that - been trying it out and it works! Artwork shows up in Subsonic (web browser player) and on iSub on my iPhone.

Now all I need is an intern to do that for all 3K albums... I guess I will have to prioritize and make a plan ;)

Thanks again, your help is much appreciated.

From inside iTunes, you can:

bring up the info window about a single mp3 file
go to the artwork tab - iTunes will show the artwork it's using here. select the image and press cmd+c (copy)
close the info window
select the whole album (all mp3 files) and bring up the info window for all of them
select the artwork box, and press cmd+v (paste)
press ok
the iTunes artwork now gets written as embedded artwork to all of your mp3 files and will be displayed in Subsonic / on an ipod etc

[hakko]

It's annoying but I never figured a way to automate it. For my own library, I first use Beets from http://beets.radbox.org/ for semi-automatic tagging/artwork and then I fall back to either downloading a cover image from inside Subsonic, or use the method explained above. Let me know if you come up with something smarter!

[patrickhenry]

Will do!

[jol]

Ideally Subsonic could get the album artwork itself, e.g. by Getting album art using Amazon Web Services. Especially when putting the covers into the database - 4.7 uses it more extensivley - there is no need to modify the original folders at all.
Maybe a topic for a modder (initially)?
Best regards, jol

[hakko]

Good idea, jol. I'll make a mental note about this. I'm currently using the last.fm API at http://www.last.fm/api/show/album.getInfo which allows me to store an image URL in the database, which I then use (rather than having my subsonic server supply the images).

[patrickhenry]

I tried this link (directly below), but writing to the beats-per-minute field. The link is directed to a different mp3 tag, but I thought it might work for the album artwork. It doesn't appear to, however.
<http://forums.ilounge.com/applescripts-itunes-mac/193864-writing-itunes-song-artist-album-id3-tag.html>
It did not work to write the album artwork to the mp3 files (I was thinking iTunes would write ***all*** tag information to the files if it had to write any).


As the above was not effective to write album artwork from the iTunes database to the mp3 files themselves, I started searching. I found something that is a step in the right direction, but it's Mac-centric - an Applescript that will write the album artwork on a selected album. See this link:
<https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2022341?start=0&tstart=0>
and this link, referred to in the previous link:
<http://dougscripts.com/itunes/2009/09/updated-embed-artwork-v2-0/>
I've tried it and it works (on my Mac). It still leaves me with going through each album one-by-one, albeit with fewer clicks each time.

[hakko]

I tried too. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it gave some error about parameters, sometimes it crashed iTunes.

For me, iTunes is a decent music organizer if keep your music in one place and just add files. But as soon as you do something more complicated (move your library, delete/update files by an external program), it's a nightmare to make iTunes realize what happened and re-build it's own index. It's clearly built to be the one and only organizer, if you dare use something different, it strikes back immediately to punish you.

[appsfinder]

Hi i have same setup i use wine for mac OS X and get tag&rename for windows then open tag&rename with wine the sort your albums all the best Mp3finder