Syncing iTunes Album Artwork

[jtconte]

I now have my iTunes Music folder on a NAS but how do I get other computers in the house to sync with the Album Artwork that is on my Mac Pro which ripped the CDs?

 

John

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi John - You need to store your complete iTunes folder on the NAS. The folder that contains the artwork directory and the actual library file. Then open iTunes holding down the option key which will allow you to select the location on the NAS of your library file. On your other computers hold down option when opening iTunes and select the same library on the NAS and all will be good. Let me know if I've confused matters worse.

 

[Audio_ELF]

iTunes (from my experience) stores images in different ways depending on how it has acquired the images.

 

If it gets the Album artwork itself from the iTunes store, these are stored separate from the music file. If you transfer the files to another PC/Mac these are lost and you need to connect to the iTunes store to download them again.

 

If you add the Album artwork manually, then it is embedded into each music file - these will be transfered with the music files.

 

There are some bits of software that will ensure that the artwork is embedded correctly. For the Mac, try searching on http://dougscripts.com/itunes/ for a script to embed the artwork. If you are using a PC, I have in the past used a program called "iTunes Store file validator" (http://itsfv.sourceforge.net/) which will embed images along with checking the formatting of the tags.

 

Hope this helps

Eloise

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi Eloise - Welcome to Computer Audiophile. Thank you so much for the comment. This is something I've been meaning to research forever, but haven't had the time. Without this understanding it is very annoying when some artwork get mysteriously lost because a file has been move to another library etc...

 

Thanks again for the information!

 

[jtconte]

I will checkout those utilities Eloise. Chris, how do I get a PC running iTunes to prompt at startup?

 

Thanks,

John

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi John - I should be the SHIFT key.

 

[jtconte]

So is it possible to have PC's and Mac's share the same music on a NAS? I copied the .itl file over to the NAS. I held SHIFT when opening iTunes and pointed it towards the file on the NAS. I changed the iTune Library location in Preferences but it still does not have most of the Album Art. I started a Consolidate hoping it would quickly build a new db file but no, so I ended that. Now I just tried Adding the Folder to the Library and it took a few minutes to do whatever but still no more Album Art. Now that I look at it, it seems that the album covers that I manually added (cmd-A, cmd-I on the Mac) are the ones showing up. I hope I'm not messing this up. Maybe I should be looking at the embed method?

 

Thanks,

John

 

[Audio_ELF]

I don't think you're messing anything up ... I think this is one of the quirks of iTunes ... I'd try looking at embedding the images into the files.