ITunes Artwork (ITC files)

[Randall Grogan]

In the "for what it is worth" department, I use iTunes as my front-end for iPod syncronization. So, my music library is managed by MediaMonkey, but has also been loaded into iTunes.

With the new version of iTunes I turned on the "Find Album Artwork" and surprisingly it did find artwork for much of my music library where artwork was missing.

I assumed that this Artwork was being stored on the mp3 files, but have just recently found that it is not. Rather, it is being stored in a series of folders outside of iTunes in a .ITC format. The .ITC format is just a wrapper for a JPEG file and there are already several apps to convert these ITC files to JPEGs.

The Artwork files are named using the Persistent Library ID and the track's ID from the XML file (iTunes library). This is how iTunes keeps track of artwork for different libraries.

iTunes uses this as a design philosophy because their "CoverFlow" functionality needs to be able to very quickly move through the Artwork as a user browses. This would not be possible if iTunes were trying to read each file.

This brings me back to MediaMonkey. Several thoughts:
* Perhaps MM could both leverage this design philosophy to speed up and organize Album Artwork for presentation (little to no lag).
* iTunes has been a promising source of album artwork. Rather than directly finding the artwork on iTunes, perhaps a script could be written to extract it from the .ITC files and embed in the mp3's. (edit: I am suggesting this because it circumvents the encrypted artwork which iTunes has begun using).