iTunes metadata and artwork

What was the path to the folder you specified for the output?

tt2

I'll try to rework the code tomorrow to put in some additional checks and perhaps allow it to skip over what would otherwise cause an error.

tt2

Sorry if I dropped the ball on this thread. Work got in the way. Have you got any further forward?

tt2

I guess I even more confused than ever. Here are the descriptions of the two scripts:

• CreateFolderArt - Creates or updates Folder.jpg artwork images. If updating images then if at least one track has art it will be embedded in any tracks from the same album that are missing artwork or only have store downloaded art.

• ExportImport - Exports or imports selected metadata. Can be used to attempt to restore data such as ratings, playcounts, genres, or other corrupted metadata from a previous iTunes library file. To export data first restore or connect to an older library file, select the tracks of interest, then run the script to export. N.b. You may need to temporarily rename the iTunes Media folder during the export phase so that iTunes cannot read the current tags of the files if your aim is to retrieve earlier versions of that information. The output file ExportImport [<Date>] [<Time>].txt is placed in the same folder as the script. Next restore the name of the media folder if you had changed it earlier, then restore or reconnect to the current database and drag & drop the output file onto the script to import. The current version of the script is set to export most, but not all, user editable fields and could be edited to bring forward other data if required. You can comment out lines for fields that don't need to be exported to speed things up a little or to avoid updating fields that you don't want to be changed.

I don't recall folding in any of the features of ExportImport into CreateFolderArt. If you replace a 160k mp3 file with a freshly minted 320k mp3 generated by converting an original wav file it will have an empty tag. Aha, perhaps some realization dawns! If there is no tag at all, rather than a tag with explicitly empty values, then that might be why you don't notice a change. iTunes is showing you all of the information it knows, and perhaps playing a track doesn't cause it to lose any details because it is behaving the same way that it does with wav files. It knows the metadata, which it can use, but nothing is embedded in the track, which is what you would normally want so the files work elsewhere. I don't think CreateFolderArt has been bringing anything to the party. If it has then it has been a happy accident rather than anything intentional. Presumably if iTunes has to create a tag in which to place embedded artwork it then also stores any other metadata that had been living only in the database.

Expose music related fields in Windows Explorer and see what information is stored for the old files before you replace them, then what data is visible in Explorer immediately after you replace with the new conversions, then look once again after running the CreateFolderArtwork script. I think you'll see the data is restored after running the script, which is what you want, but that certainly isn't what the script was designed to do. I'm guessing that might also explain the issue with lyrics if these are only ever stored in the tags, and referenced on demand from there when needed. If that is the case then this accidental metadata preservation method wouldn't work.

In a normal layout each album would be in a single folder, and all tracks for that album would be in that folder. Back in Windows XP if you wanted the folder to show the album artwork you had to store the image as Folder.jpg in the same folder as the tracks., which is the task the script was created for. If tracks from multiple albums are in the same folder, and processed by the script at the same time, then the first pass of the script may repeatedly update Folder.jpg with successive images for different albums, and the second pass may apply whatever image was saved last to all tracks whatever album they come from. This won't be what you want to happen. If you only work with tracks from one album at a time it isn't so much of a problem, although if those tracks are in different folders then the script might not achieve another of its objectives of ensuring that each track from the same album has exactly the same image embedded in the tag. It used to bug me when I'd see a subtle, or sometimes not so subtle, change of image as I was playing an album.

I shall think on about how to allow bulk processing when tracks from an album might be scattered through different folders. I've had a look and ExportImport already allows for lyrics to be archived and restored so I would suggest you test it on a few tracks to see how well it works for you.

tt2

The first error path looks very odd. I can't think why the CreateFolderArt script would be trying to save there, it is an invalid path. The second one looks more sensible, assuming that folder exists. If it doesn't then clearly in both cases the error is because the file cannot be created at that location.

You used the ExportImport script in export mode twice in succession. The second export would have been the new conversion without the preserved lyrics. Try again with a single track in 160k, export, replace track, drag & drop the exported file onto ExportImport to restore the lyrics.

tt2

William Richards3 wrote:

And a note on Plex as you likely know, they require this Artist/album kind of structure for that to all work. So while the songs play fine, they're a hodgepodge of wrong album art and not all the songs come in when I tie in the itunes plug-in or try to import playlists.

Again I think is where having the correct metadata in the files is going to help you.

Any thoughts you might have on how to make Plex - or Synology (which is another consideration) - work would be appreciated but that's likely outside this forum as this is Apple specific I guess (?).

Thanks again!

Hi,

I've updated ExportImport again. The new version should be able to relink the entry in your library to an updated file that is in a different format as long as the replacement file is in the same folder, and just has a different file extension. The process below also works if you, for example, replace a 160k mp3 with a 320k version.

To test it I first used the script to export metadata and artwork for a sample track. I then used iTunes to create a copy of that track in Apple Lossless format, edited or removed most of the metadata from the ALAC version, including the artwork and the lyrics. I then removed the ALAC copy from the library without deleting the file, and moved the original .mp3 to a new folder to break the link to the library. Next I ran the ExportImport script in import mode by dragging and dropping the exported metadata file onto the script. The script connected the now-broken entry in the library that was pointed at the missing .mp3 file to the new .m4a ALAC replacement, and restored the correct metadata including artwork image and lyrics.

Initial .mp3 version:

Running ExportImport:

Apple Lossless version with edited metadata to simulate a fresh conversion from a .wav original. Note I'm not using the iTunes features to keep the media folder organized, so changing properties here doesn't change the filename or location:

Running ExportImport in import mode:

And the library now has an Apple Lossless version instead of the mp3 copy, with all of the same metadata:

Let us see if this new version of the script lets you do the task we started out with. I'm pretty sure it will. I'll discuss artwork clean up in the file system, the minutiae of the iTunes artwork cache, and WMPs side effects in another post.

tt2

Artwork files - 1 of 2

Back in the day Windows had Windows Media Player. Even if you never actively used it it was possible for it to fire up in the background in response to media on the web. Given half a chance WMP would attempt to scan your user's music folder for any music files to add to its library. WMP might then embed any relevant artwork it could find and the folder would also gain hidden artwork images in the form AlbumArt_{<GUID>}_Large.jpg and AlbumArt_{<GUID>}_Small.jpg for each album that WMP saw as distinct. I.e. there could be more than one set of seemingly identical images for tracks from the same album. The folder would also get a Folder.jpg and AlbumArtSmall.jpg image to be used as the thumbnail for the folder when viewed in Window Explorer. You might also find Desktop.ini and Thumbs.db files. Once created these hidden files will be copied whenever the folder is copied from one place to another, and since they are hidden most people have no reason to become aware of them.

iTunes doesn't make any use of Folder.jpg images or other artwork stored in the same folder as a track. If the file has a tag with embedded artwork then iTunes will use that, otherwise if you're signed into the iTunes Store and have given it permission iTunes will attempt to locate the track in the iTunes Store and if found it will download the associated artwork. This doesn't get automatically embedded in the tag. Instead is stored only in the Album Artwork cache in the form of a .itc2 file, which is a custom container that can hold images in different formats. Again there is the use of a GUID (globally unique identifier) to reference each image and the cache is set out in something akin to a database structure called a hash table. The idea is that iTunes can quickly locate the correct image for a track based on its GUID, or determine that no image exists, and these are all read from the cache as you scroll through the library rather than being extracted on demand from the tag of each track as you scroll through the library.

Other media players such as Plex will generally work with embedded artwork but may also have their own lookup services that try to fetch missing or additional metadata for your media. Looking at Plex's advanced options for managing its music library I see that you can optionally choose to prefer local metadata over anything that its service would otherwise track down, presumably by analysing the file name. There is also a hint there that it might try to make use of locally stored images, but I haven't worked out exactly how it does so.

Your music will work best across a range of applications and devices if its metadata is complete and consistent, with related content stored in a well structured manner. CreateFolderArt was created as one of a number of tools to help me with this task, however it assumes that files are in an iTunes-like layout, with only one album to a folder. Using it in any other context can have unexpected results. The new ExportImport script will do a better job of preserving and restoring the right image for each track as you upgrade them from 160k .mp3 to your chosen format.

tt2