I've been trying to get the album art for my MP3 collection organised and I've noticed iTunes will search for artwork for me. But does iTunes actually embed the album art in the MP3 so it will be displayed by any program playing that file, or does it just chuck the artwork in a folder somewhere and it only displays in iTunes?
iTunes will add the artwork to the file itself, with two exceptions, one "glaring" while the other is not so obvious.
Although you refer to MP3 files, there are several file types that you may be using, for various reasons. They all work the same way. In your iTunes Library, when you select an album of songs and use Edit/Get Info/Artwork, and either paste artwork into the artwork panel, or use Add Artwork (and then go to the storage location of the artwork), iTunes adds the picture to each song file. So if you then play the song in another programme, you will see the artwork. If you move the file, the artwork will go with it. This works for almost every audio file type.
The glaring exception is .wav files. Artwork cannot be added to wav files, so if you "add artwork" in iTunes to a wav file, that is the time that iTunes keeps the picture somewhere else and refers to that when it needs to display it. Consequently, if you copy that wav file to somewhere else, the artwork will not go with it.
The less obvious issue is if you use artwork that does not conform the the standard requirements, such as images that are too large. I usually use images that are 300x300, or as lagre as 600x600 and in jpg format.
If iTunes fetches artwork from the store then it doesn't embed it. If you paste in artwork via the Song Info dialog then it does. I have two scripts that can help with embedding artwork; CreateFolderArt and EmbedFolderArt. The scripts have slightly different functions:
CreateFolderArt ensures that every album folder ends up with a Folder.jpg image which is the art that iTunes already knows about. Side effects are that if artwork has been updated in iTunes the folder art should be updated also, and if any track from the album doesn't have embedded artwork it gets embedded.
EmbedFolderArt was actually written for someone who already had various artwork images stored in the album folders and wanted them added to their tracks, but not if iTunes had already downloaded a better quality image. It creates new files of any store art with the name iTunesArt.jpg, then embeds the largest image by area in the album's folder, based on the premise that this is likely to be the best image.
In either case you could search and destroy the images in the folders after they are embedded if you don't want them.
tt2
They're actual MP3 files so embedding is definitely possible.
So from what you guys are saying iTunes will embed the artwork but only if I manually add it to each album in iTunes. That sounds pretty time consuming.
The friend, does your script only work if the files are organised into folders by album? Unfortunately mine aren't, I've been relying on the ID3 tags.
Both scripts rely on the fact that in a well formed iTunes library each album lives in its own folder. It would potentially be possible to adapt one of them to store all the artwork in a separate folder with names such as <Album Artist> ~ <Album>.jpg so they wouldn't clash.
tt2
Partly because I wanted to update the folder artwork I'd inherited from Windows Media Player, and have visible artwork for every album in my library even though I'd switched over to using iTunes. It is also possible for different tracks from the same album to end up with different artwork. Both scripts behave in a way that ensures that whatever image is used for the album it will be used consistently for all tracks. That said I could make a script that ignores those concerns and simply embeds the store image if there is one without other side effects.
tt2
If the script embeds the album art in the files, why are they being stored in a folder at all?
Embedding Album Art
