Quick iTunes question - Album art

[Marcos]

If i add album art to albums via itunes, is that stored in some special itunes folder or does it do it properly and save a folder.jpg to the actual folder where the music is? Allowing other library systems to use it.

I dont let itunes organise my music as i have done it all to my liking (tags and all etc), but i dont want to spend an afternoon adding album art to find it is locked into itunes and will disappear if i move it to another computer

thanks

[s_kinton]

They wont disappear, provided you keep a backup of you itunes folder.

Itunes doesnt save the file as a seperate jpg in the folder. Its stored in the files ID3 tag

This question has been asked alot all over the internet. Perhaps its best to start with google.

[Marcos]

so it increases the size of each audio file?

and is that id3 thumbnail data readable by other apps?

[Funkstar]

Yes and yes.

To be picky, if it is AAC tracks you are talking about, they don't use ID3 tags, they are particular to MP3 files (and a few otherformats, but thats a fudge). In general you are talking about meta data.

There are loas of apps, both free and payed, that can read and edit this data.

I use Tag&Rename. It costs, but i like the interface and the way it works.

http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm - you can get a trial version to play around with for a month.

[Marcos]

The problem being i want the album art to work on both XBMC and itunes and anything else i use in the future, it seems like only doing the manual folder.jpg will make that work

then again, does folder.jpg work for itunes??

[charleski]

iTunes used to store all album art added in the program inside its own cryptic directories, but that changed a few versions ago (without any notification in the ever-terse release notes). Are you using mp3 files? If so, there should be no problem, as any even slightly decent mp3 player will be able to fetch the art out of the ID3 tag. AAC files might be a problem, as some players still don't completely understand the structure of the atoms in an mp4 container, but that should improve.

[Marcos]

well lets hope it goes by title and artist, because some of my album names are custom to make things easier for me on the ipod..

i'm running my entire library through itunes right now to process album artwork, but i have not set itunes to organise my music for me, do you reckon it'll still add the album art to the files even though they are not truly imported?

[Funkstar]

The problem being i want the album art to work on both XBMC and itunes and anything else i use in the future, it seems like only doing the manual folder.jpg will make that work

then again, does folder.jpg work for itunes??

Everything should use the embeded album artwork, that is the whol point of meta data.

Things like folder.jpg were used because some formats (like FLAC especially) didn't allow you to add pictures as meta data. I guess some formats still don't, but all the ones i come accross do.

[charleski]

do you reckon it'll still add the album art to the files even though they are not truly imported?

There'll be no problem there.