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September 20, 2007

itunes

iTunes Tip: Find all tracks with (and without) artwork

Posted Sep. 20, ’07, 10:30 AM PT by Dan Pourhadi
Category | iTunes

albumcovers.jpgiTunes is a robust piece of ones and zeros. Lots of spiffy features and handy settings. Plus the obligatory eye-candy like Cover Flow, which, while purdy and even sometimes useful, isn’t the most effective means of visualizing your boy-band-riddled pirated music collection. Not because it isn’t easy to use — but because it becomes rather useless when you have a bunch of albums that don’t actually have album art. Related to that little quibble, here’s an interesting question brought up by Cyrus’ friend, Aaron Azlant:

I have a lot of random mixtapes and things without covers, but I think that all of the blank entries are kind of unsightly. Is there a way to get Cover Flow to only display covers that it has art for?

Sounds simple enough, right? Well…no. No it’s not.

My first thought: Smart Playlists. Then just browse Cover Flow in that playlist. But nope. No “Album Artwork” option there. In fact, there is no way in iTunes to sort, filter, or identify songs that have (or do not have) album artwork without going through each individual track manually. And what a pain in the at-symbol-dollar-sign-dollar-sign that would be.

Fortunately, I can become incredibly determined (my clueless therapist calls it “obsessive”), and so I spent several hours looking eagerly for The Perfect Solution. I didn’t find it, of course, but I found one that’s pretty darn good: After a few Google searches, I came across Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. There I found a script called “Tracks Without Artwork to Playlist.” Don’t let the vague, wacky name throw you — all it does is look at your iTunes Library (or whatever songs/playlists you have selected), identifies each track that doesn’t have cover art, and adds it to a new playlist called “No Art.”

Excellent…except for the fact that it does exactly the opposite of what I was looking for. So I did what any obsessive friendless nerd would do: I opened up Script Editor and re-wrote it. About a dozen errors and an hour later (I’m an AppleScript n00b), “Tracks With Artwork to Playlist” (download link, .dmg, 92kb) was born. And yes, unlike Doug’s abstractly-named original script, mine does exactly what the title suggests: searches the playlist of your choice (including your main music library), identifies all the tracks with cover art, and adds them to a new playlist called “With Art.” Run the script and watch the magic happen. Then simply view Cover Flow in that playlist and say goodbye to the unsightliness that is Generic Music Note.

There are some caveats, of course: You have to run the script every time you want the playlist to be updated with new music. And, as Doug notes in the original Read Me, if you try to use it on too many tracks at once, it could take a really, really, really long time. Or, uh, crash the script. Check out the Read Me included in the download for more information.

Have any of you run into this kind of situation? Have you come up with your own solution? Any questions about this AppleScript? Let us know in the comments!


4 Comments

Jason said:

Why not just run Dougs script as is and then make a smart playlist set to "Playlist -- is not -- No Art". Then you can add other criteria and have a more customized playlist. You also wouldn't have to run the script every time you add music because they'll automatically be in the new smart playlist.

September 20, 2007 12:48 PM
Dan Pourhadi said:

@Jason -- Because you'd have to run Doug's script on your ENTIRE library for that Smart Playlist to work -- otherwise you'd get extraneous tracks.

With this script, you can art-ify specific playlists (so you don't have to sit through the process of scanning 10,000 songs.)

Plus, you WOULD have to run Doug's script every time you add music -- otherwise new music without artwork would be added to the Smart Playlist, since it's not automatically added to the "No Art" playlist.

September 20, 2007 12:54 PM
lorem ipsum said:

(off topic)
Love the blog!
Sick of the calls for comments!
(I fell for it, didn't I)

September 20, 2007 1:05 PM
cycling girl said:

Why not just add the album art instead? I know it can be a little tedious going through every item, but you only have to do it once (it took me less than two hours). You can batch-add images by selecting the whole album and then Get Info.

I found the images on Amazon and in searches on Google and Yahoo. For mixtapes or items that you just can't find the art, you can put any image in there. Perhaps whomever gave you the mixtape made a cover — scan it and use that image.

I think this is preferable because then you can listen to your whole library as opposed to eliminating artless tracks.

Also, iTunes seems to attach wrong artwork to items with names that are similar to other things. Like all of my albums titled Greatest Hits originally had the wrong artwork attached. Correcting it as above handled that.

One tip: sort by album first and scroll down that column to check the covers (in Cover View, obviously).

September 24, 2007 1:51 AM

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