iTunes 11, cover art, losing hard drive space rapidly

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iTunes 11, cover art, losing hard drive space rapidly

Hi,

recently I started adding missing cover art to my iTunes library, using the new window in iTunes 11 which allows to add one jpg to all tracks of an album at once. The picture files I used are about 10-40 KB each, and I expected iTunes to somehow compress them by its own even more.

I was rather shocked however to find out that after maybe 100-200 hundred newly added images, my hard drive space shrunk by almost 30 GB!

Now I have begun to try and erase those cover images, re-adding them only to the first of each album track (which has the same effect to the iTunes album view) – but the space keeps shrinking again at enormous pace (having edited 20 albums this way, I lost another GB of space).

What is going wrong?

I would be most grateful for an answer.

Thanks a lot!

iPod classic, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Dec 20, 2012 8:18 AM

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Answer 1

icerabbit

Level 3

803 points

Dec 20, 2012 10:19 AM in response to Schwarzburg

Have you checked out

/username/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork/

and done a Get Info to verify that folder's size is giving you issues?

And, do you verify the mp3 file size while adding the album artwork, by using song view with the size column visible?

I typically see it add 100-400KB to an individual mp3 when I add a cover using 500x500 px or so jpg images that are between 100-200KB, using slight compression (75%). If you just select all + copy / paste the default format from preview into the cover art box; preview will use PNG and it wil take 500KB and more for the same image.

For reference. I've been rebuilding my library and adding album artwork to over a 150 albums now, and the Art Work folder is ~250MB. I currently have close to 3000 mp3s at either 192k or 256k bit rate, across 170 albums, with art work to the majority of files; and my library is 18GB.

The thing that is mushrooming my iTunes folder is the iOS backups and the glut of hundreds of apps & app updates it pulls in.

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Answer 2

Schwarzburg Author

Level 1

0 points

Dec 25, 2012 9:37 AM in response to icerabbit

Thanks a lot! Actually, after a complete reboot of my computer - which I probably should have tried sooner - the peculiar space loss was gone and my hard drive back at some 70 GB of free space again. The odd GB haemmorrhaging seems to have been a short-lived apparition. I checked the folder as you suggested, and everything seems to be fine.

Thanks again!

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