iTunes 10.6.3 Album Art?

[mac57mac57]

Now that iTunes 10.6.3 under Leopard and Sorbet Leopard can no longer connect to the iTunes Store, does anyone out there know of alternate ways to populate album art for the albums in an iTunes library? Thanks!

 

[Grumpus]

I can't really vouch for it, but take a look at get_cover_art on github.

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks @Grumpus , I have downloaded it and will give it a whirl. I'll report back how it goes.

 

[Grumpus]

Thanks @Grumpus , I have downloaded it and will give it a whirl. I'll report back how it goes.

It needs a newish version of python. I don't know if the versions on offer from python.org will work on Leopard, but if not you could use MacPorts (Homebrew supports only the 3 most-recent versions of macOS).

 

[mac57mac57]

Yes, I saw that it needed Python 3.5+. I just installed Python 3.8 from MacPorts on my PowerMac G5, so I suspect that I am OK there. Is there a preferred version of Python for this?

 

[Grumpus]

Is there a preferred version of Python for this?

Not that I know of, as long as it's python3. I suggest downloading the artwork into a separate directory before you commit to embedding into your music files. The artwork comes from Apple's Music service and sometimes the artwork for a given album might be different that what you were expecting.

 

[mac57mac57]

Using Python 3.8, I ran this. It did a great job of finding and downloading album artwork, but it did not embed that artwork into the music files, or at least not in a way that iTunes sees it. It did however leave me with a large folder containing JPEGs of album covers for every album I have, so that is a significant aid going forward. Too bad it will not automatically embed it so that iTunes sees the artwork, but it is still a huge step forward. Thanks @Grumpus.

 

[mac57mac57]

Update to the above: get_cover_art DID embed the artwork, it is just that iTunes was not seeing it. I deleted my iTunes files, reloaded my library from its main source (I keep my music files separate from iTunes and do not allow it to copy the files into the library as it adds them). This had the effect of making iTunes scan ALL the music files again and this time it "saw" and picked up the artwork and showed it as expected. In the end, it missed finding artwork for only 9 albums out of hundreds, so I call that a pretty darn good result.

@Grumpus, a double thank you. This has saved me hours (maybe days) of work!