Question about the itunes_insert_artwork script

[Jeff Lavin]

Hi,

 

Thanks so much for the great utilities. I’m just trying one out and had a question before I push the button.

 

I have a huge library, and some is in mp3 format and some in AAC (m4a) format ripped from my CDs. Some of my albums  have the album art embedded in the tag of each file, which is what I want, while many get the album cover from Itunes and that is not stored in the music file itself, but in some separate database. My goal is to get all of the album art embedded into the tags for the music files that currently  do not have them embedded. It seems that the script mentioned is intended to do this.

 

Question 1: 

Will the script work for both MP3 and AAC files, or do I need to convert the tags first to some specific format?

 

Question 2:

The brief instructions indicate that I need to make a playlist for the files I want the script to run on first. Since I have no way of knowing which files already have embedded album art vs the ones Itunes is fixing up, can I just add everything to a giant playlist? Will the script figure out which ones to update?

 

Question 3:

I started to run the script but chickened out and decided to ask some questions first. However, I got so far as to get a question from the script first. It asks if I want to keep the extracted image file. I’m not sure what that means. I assume the script is grabbing the image file from the Itunes database and writing it into the music file. Is the question asking if I want to throw away the image file from the Itunes database after it is written to all the music files? Am I missing something here?

 

 

Any other tips you have based on what I am hoping to do would be great. Thanks again for the assist. If this works it is very very cool!

 

Best regards,

 

Jeff Lavin

[ter...@gmail.com]

On Jul 6, 6:06 pm, "Jeff Lavin" <jeffla...@gmail.com> wrote:

> My goal is to get all of the album art embedded into the
> tags for the music files that currently  do not have them embedded. It seems
> that the script mentioned is intended to do this.

Correct.

> Will the script work for both MP3 and AAC files, or do I need to convert the
> tags first to some specific format?

Yes, it will work for any file for which iTunes supports embedding
tags. That includes MP3 and AAC files, but not WAV or AIFF (which
don't support tagging).

> The brief instructions indicate that I need to make a playlist for
the files
> I want the script to run on first. Since I have no way of knowing which
> files already have embedded album art vs the ones Itunes is fixing up, can I
> just add everything to a giant playlist? Will the script figure out which
> ones to update?

It will ignore tracks which don't have artwork downloaded from
iTunes. I suppose it's possible that some tracks have *both*
downloaded and embedded artwork (though this would have to occur
outside of iTunes, I think). In this case, the embedded artwork will
be replaced with the downloaded artwork.

> I started to run the script but chickened out and decided to ask some
> questions first. However, I got so far as to get a question from the script
> first. It asks if I want to keep the extracted image file.

I think if I explain how the script works, it will make sense. For
every track in the playlist, it checks to see if the track has
downloaded artwork. If so, it saves the downloaded artwork to a
file. It then embeds the artwork from that file into the track. It
is your choice whether to keep the downloaded artwork file (as a JPEG,
or PNG, most likely).

Hope that helps,
Rob

[jeffla]

Rob,

Great info! One last question:

Itunes is having a tough time making a playlist with 40,000 songs. Any
way I can tell the script to run against the whole library?

Thanks,

Jeff

[ter...@gmail.com]

> Any way I can tell the script to run against the whole library?

Yes, just select the "Music" library.

[jeffla]

Hey I tried it along with some of the other scripts. Worked like a
charm! Thanks very much for writing these. What a find!

Jeff

[Stefan G. Altnau]

I know, these are a little "aged", but will they work with itunes 11? 

Your script seems to be the exact and sole way to embedd my album artwork from itunes automatically into my AAC files.....

[ter...@gmail.com]

Well the existing script only works in iTunes 7 or 8 (obviously I haven't worked on them in a long time).  However, you can edit the VBS version of the script and it should work ( but I haven't tested it).

Download the VBS version (save it to your Desktop):

http://www.pobox.com/~teridon/itunesscripts/itunes_insert_artwork.vbs

Edit the script in a text editor (Notepad or similar) and change this line:

Reg1.Pattern = "^7"

to this:

Reg1.Pattern = "^"

Save it and exit the text editor.

Open a command prompt and cd to the directory (i.e. type "cd Desktop")

Run the script by typing

    cscript itunes_insert_artwork.vbs

The edited script should work with any iTunes version.

[Stefan G. Altnau]

Wow, thanks for the fast response. I will try this out right away when I am home.

btw, do you know if there is a similar way to do this for Lyrics? If I am not mistaken, they are also stored in a seperate itunes database  and not integrated into the ID3 Tag, right? Would it be hard to join the two into one script?

thanks so much for your work and help,

Stefan

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Teridon's iTunes Programs" group.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/teridons-itunes-programs/-/dKSLvURhXOMJ.

To post to this group, send email to teridons-itu...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to teridons-itunes-pr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/teridons-itunes-programs?hl=en.

[Robert Jacobson]

On 1/9/2013 5:22 AM, Stefan G. Altnau wrote:

> btw, do you know if there is a similar way to do this for Lyrics? If I
> am not mistaken, they are also stored in a seperate itunes database and
> not integrated into the ID3 Tag, right?

Actually I'm pretty sure iTunes embeds the lyrics in the song already;
i.e. you shouldn't need a script to do that. Once you set the lyrics,
they are embedded in the tag.

[Roger Williams]

I would like to chim in here and mention I am not a coder in the most remote sense.  I do however 
like this little program and have used it for years and I believe it is the best around, even though you
have not had the time to keep it up to date.  It is the only little program I have found that works easy
for me.  I do audio books almost exclusively because of my macro-degeneration.  I just really want to
say thanks! 

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Teridon's iTunes Programs" group.