I was just listening to my music collection via XBMC and I noticed that despite my significant efforts to keep my iTunes mp3 collection nicely ordered, a lot of my new albums were ‘missing’ album artwork.
At first I couldn’t work out why as I always ensure that all new albums have the correct artwork and all in iTunes which I use to manage my files, before I sync them to XBMC or to any other device. Then I realised what was happening. Since iTunes 7 came out, it has been adding artwork automatically to files without me manually having to do it. Unfortunately though what iTunes 7 appears to be doing is rather than adding the artwork directly to the ID3 tag so that any other application or player can also see the artwork, it’s only adding the artwork to iTunes own music database. So to get the artwork to appear in other apps or XBMC, I’ve had to convert iTunes images into folder.jpg files and manually add them to the ID3 tags using mp3tag. Anotther way to add artwork is to follow my guide to Tidying Up iTunes, which walks you through how to correctly tag your files so that all mp3 players including iTunes can display and play your tunes in their full glory.
I guess Apple have decided to do this as I think the images are coming from the iTunes Music Store so technically they own the images, but it’s another reason why many users are going to struggle to ever break the stranglehold that the iPod/iTunes have on the market.
I’m so desperate to break away from Apple, if only to try something new. If anyone can show me an easy way to way to export all of my iTunes ratings to Windows Media Player (I’ve already worked out how to easily convert iTunes playlists to m3u playlists) then I think I’ll definitely be getting a Zune or another iPod ‘rival’ next year, as WMP is a much better player in my view and it will also give me better integration with my media centers.
