Re-embed? Doesn’t downloading album art already handle that? Alas, no (or to be fair to those who’d rather not embed album art, “alas it’s not an option to”). ( MORE: Is Music Piracy Really ‘The New Radio’? Yes and No)įortunately, I chanced on a little site called Doug’s AppleScripts while searching for iTunes automation tools, specifically something called “Embed Artwork,” a freebie Apple Script (written by the apparently godlike “Doug”) that can “re-embed artwork downloaded from the iTunes Store into the files of the selected tracks.” (Note: For OS X 10.6 and 10.7 users, you’ll want Doug’s “Re-Embed Artwork” Apple Script, since he admits the original script “does not appear to work in OS X Lion”). What I needed was album art, but nearly 25,000 songs and just shy of 2,000 albums…I’d either have to find a way to automate the process, or plan a week of vacation (or two) parked in front of my flatscreen.
Launching songs on my television via Apple TV is just as drab until Cupertino’s default screen-saving melange of lions, rhinos and baby seals pops up to background whatever I’m listening to. Opening Apple’s “Cover Flow” displays a library of identical black boxes, each containing a pair of eighth notes joined by crossbar.
A year ago I opted to convert those songs over from the free lossless audio codec format, or FLAC, to Apple’s lossless alternative, mostly so I could play them in iTunes as well as through other i-devices without fitful hack-arounds, or having to maintain a duplicate library in an agnostic, lossy format like MP3.Īfter the conversion, I realized my collection looked sort of dead, devoid as it’s been of album art - just a mammoth scrolling list of track names and album titles.
Starting from zero, it takes iTunes about 20 minutes to add everything to my library, running off a 7200 RPM external hard drive. Follow that time again: When the evil, obsessive-compulsive, mirror-verse me starts picking at piles of disorganized digital information, speaking in sepulchral tones: “Time to get to work, Matt.” This time it’s my iTunes library - not gargantuan at nearly 25,000 songs, but far from modest.