Artwork not showing up in MPFreaker

[Ted]

Hi, just bought and started using the program -- love it! One problem:

For a lot of tracks where the artwork in iTunes is present, no art indicator appears in the Art column in MPFreaker. It does appear to handle things correctly -- it will download the art where it is genuinely missing from iTunes, but it would be very helpful if I can reliably see which tracks do have art (and what it is in the Detail Drawer).

Example: MPFreaker wasn't showing that I already had art in iTunes for Led Zeppelin's "How The West Was One".

Thanks!
Ted
P.S. What's the story with the program's name -- MPFreaker??

[beastie]

The only known reason for this to happen is with artwork that iTunes itself has added with its Advanced > Get Album Artwork menu command. This artwork is not stored in the standard way (within the song files themselves), but is instead stored in a proprietary fashion separately within your iTunes library folder. We're working on a way for MPFreaker to see this art seamlessly.

In the meantime, you can take another route: run a script which goes through the selected tracks in iTunes and ensures that the artwork is embedded in the song files themselves so applications outside of iTunes (such as MPFreaker) can see them. I'm not sure this will help for artwork that came with recent tracks you purchased on the iTunes Music Store which may not be showing in MPFreaker.

You can get this Embed Artwork script on Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes site here, or just use the script below if you've worked with AppleScript in iTunes before:

Code: Select all

tell application "iTunes"
   repeat with aTrack in selection
      repeat with anArtwork in artworks of aTrack
         if downloaded of anArtwork is true then
            set theData to data of anArtwork
            set data of anArtwork to theData
         end if
      end repeat
   end repeat
end tell

If you have whole albums affected by this issue, using this script will embed copies of the artwork into each song, thereby taking up more space. This is not likely to increase the amount of space occupied by these tracks by more than 3%, as artwork space is minimal compared to the audio data itself.

Leon

[Ted]

Hi Leon,

Thanks for the detailed answer. I have indeed loaded most of my artwork using Advanced > Get Album Artwork. The vast majority of my iTunes Library comes from my large CD collection.

I did run MPFreaker for the entire Library. (It is still running -- I'm guessing it will take 24 - 36 hours to do the whole thing). Will it overwrite all the iTunes originated cover art? (I do NOT have any overwrite boxes checked). If so, am I losing out on cover art quality, as the stuff from iTunes tends to be high rez.? I guess a good question is where does MPFreaker get its cover art from?

Thanks again,
Ted

[beastie]

MPFreaker won't exactly overwrite existing artwork in iTunes in a case like this, but I believe that iTunes will start ignoring the earlier non-embedded proprietary artwork after MPFreaker installs artwork into the song files themselves -- effectively overriding earlier (potentially high quality) images. You could very well end up with lower quality artwork, though you can go into MPFreaker's preferences and set a lower limit there to ensure that you aren't taking a big step down in quality.

MPFreaker gets artwork from various sources around the internet, so it is definitely not as consistently high quality as what you get from iTunes's "Get Album Artwork". That said, iTunes seems to get far more "false positives" (wrong album cover) than MPFreaker.

It may be a bit late for your music library, but "Get Album Artwork" users would definitely benefit from running the above Embed Artwork script on their entire library before letting loose MPFreaker on it.

Oh, and MPFreaker is just a cute play on "MP3"

[Ted]

I stopped it, about half way through when I got home (after it had run for 24 hours!!).

Is there a way, to delete all the newly added artwork, redo the iTunes get cover art, then run the script and run MPFreaker all the way through?

[beastie]

Ted, probably the best thing for you to do at this stage is this:

1) Run the above AppleScript in order to embed all of your current iTunes-specific artwork. This won't take long, I don't think.

2) Adjust MPFreaker's preferences so that the minimum size is something higher quality (such as 400). Set the overwrite threshold there to the same value. In the advanced drawer, turn on artwork overwrite. Run MPFreaker through your whole library again -- it won't touch any songs that already have good artwork, whether it came from iTunes Get Album Artwork or MPFreaker's previous pass.

Consider turning on MPFreaker's "Send statistics to LairWare" preference before running it through your library again. That'll help us improve MPFreaker's ability to gather artwork for the next time.

Leon

[Ted]

Leon, I appreciate this suggestion, but I didn't spend months and months ripping my CD collection to Apple Lossless to end up with less than optimal artwork on a lot of my tracks.

There has to be a way to delete the newly loaded artwork. Picking the tracks in question is easy -- I just do a sort by date modified, and can create a playlist from that. The problem is that right clicking and doing a "Remove Downloaded Artwork" doesn't work, nor does opening the info tab on multiple tracks and checking/unchecking the artwork checkbox. Doing it for a single track, selecting the artwork and hitting the delete button does work.

I guess that one has to use an AppleScript -- I checked Doug's scripts and there is a "delete all artwork from iPod script", which presumably can be changed, to delete from a given playlist instead of iPod. Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you,
Ted

[beastie]

If it doesn't work to use iTunes' "Get Info" window on multiple tracks to remove artwork, that is indeed surprising. You should be checking the artwork checkbox there, and leaving it checked.

How about using MPFreaker's "Remove" button below the artwork display, with your affected songs selected?

[Ted]

If it doesn't work to use iTunes' "Get Info" window on multiple tracks to remove artwork, that is indeed surprising. You should be checking the artwork checkbox there, and leaving it checked.

How about using MPFreaker's "Remove" button below the artwork display, with your affected songs selected?

Thanks, I'll give that a try tonight.