iTunes Artwork not modifiable

Question

Level 1

4 points

iTunes Artwork not modifiable

I recently bought a new Macbook pro. I have all my music saved on an external Hard Drive and it took 60 hours to transfer 25,000 songs to iTunes. I though this was very slow but it may be because the files within the music folder were not organised well enough for iTunes so it took longer to transfer the data. When it eventually finished everything seemed ok except there was a lot of artwork missing. On my previous laptop I had to manually drag and drop the missing artwork from the internet so i thought it would be a simple case of doing that again.

Unfortunately iTunes won't let me do this as the square on the bottom left of the screen where the artwork would show says "Artwork not modifiable" or something similar. I am not a whizz on computers so I am a bit stuck. I went to the music folder on the external hard drive and rightclicked to click on "Get Info" and it says that it is read only. I need to know:

WIll this cause problems in the future when I buy songs through iTunes on my iPhone etc. These would then normally be added to the music files on the external hard drive when I attach it and open up iTunes?

Why has the hard drive changed to read only?

How can I fix this?

😕

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2012)

Posted on Feb 28, 2013 2:49 AM

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Answer 1

ejpre

Level 3

810 points

Feb 28, 2013 9:57 AM in response to sacha-g

I don't know why this might have happened, but it will definitely screw things up if you try to buy new music. The artwork thing was just the first symptom.

To fix it:

- Go to the top level directory (Music, Media, iTunes, whatever)

- Right-click->Get Info

- click the little "lock" in the lower right. You'll have to enter an admin username and password

(yours if you have admin privileges; otherwise use and admin account).

- Set your access in the list to "read and write". If the directory somehow got the wrong owner, use

the little "+" and "-" arrow to remove the wrong one and add yourself.

- (very important). Click on the little "gear" on the bottom and select "Apply to enclosed items....". This

will propagate the changes to all subdirectories.

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Answer 2

sacha-g Author

Level 1

4 points

Feb 28, 2013 1:18 PM in response to ejpre

Thank you for your reply. I have tried what you said but there is no little "lock" so I am still stuck. See screenshots below of both the Hard Drive and the Music file in it.

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Answer 3

ejpre

Level 3

810 points

Mar 1, 2013 4:54 AM in response to sacha-g

Aha, it's formatted as NTFS (WIndows NT filesystem), which (for God knows what reason) is readonly be default on a Mac. The claim is this utility will allow you read/write:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g

You could also flex your Unix muscles and follow the instruction here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_nc0NTw8ds

If you have follow up questions, they should go to one of the OS discussion groups, where you're more likely to get answers.

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Answer 4

sacha-g Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 1, 2013 5:32 AM in response to ejpre

Unfortunately I can't do either. The first option comes up with:

Is it Ok to change the security preferences to allow this?

The second option looked helpful but when the person said right click and then click on "information" that wasn't a choice on the drop down menu! On the information given for the hard drive there is a comment regarding permissions but the instruction to click on is grayed out.

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Answer 5

sacha-g Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 1, 2013 6:04 AM in response to sacha-g

I changed the security settings to allow the installation of NTFS-3G but it caused a problem with the external hard drive and the macbook wouldn't open it anymore. I have had to uninstall it.

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