screen sharing mac mini artwork

[steve dixon]

not sure where to put this one exactly, but here goes.

i've installed a 32gb ssd in the mac mini, managed to install all the osx plus upgrades etc, got itunes running and i'm using it 'headless' via screen sharing on my ibook. all is well sounds great works beautifully, but, and isn't there always a 'but'?

 

i've started ripping disc's into wav format on an external hdd but when i select advanced>get album artwork itunes 9 selectively picks up one or two album covers then notifies that some are unavailable, ok then.

 

go to amazon.com download album cover to desktop, highlight the album in itunes then command I to add artwork manually, double click the little artwork box, select desktop, select artwork and it appears in the little box, click ok, back to itunes, and guess what, no artwork. any ideas anyone??? and yes i'm using the correct screen and downloading the artwork to the correct desktop.

 

my system is the 'headless' mac mini 1.66 duo/2gb ram, toslink out to beresford 7510 dac, analogue out to linn classik, then diy commonsense audio speakers. i also use a yamaha external cd reader/writer for the amqr function and ripping.

thanks

steve

 

[souptin]

Quick guess (ie I haven't checked this myself) - wav format doesn't allow for embedded tags. I know that the itunes automatic artwork feature stores the pictures within it's own database, not embedded within the files, but when I manually add artwork, using the same technique as you, it actually embeds the data into the file. A quick test with aiff or alac should confirm if it's file format related. Only other possibility I can think of is some kind of permissions problem.

 

[Audio_ELF]

I'd concur with soupTin - the problem is you're using .wav files nothing to do with screen sharing. The general recomendation is to use AIFF files on Mac as this is the 'native' uncompressed audio file format for Apple and also allows embedded tags and artwork. IIRC with iTunes you only get album art for albums available in iTunes Music Store and can't add artwork for others.

 

Eloise

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

The only way to get a WAV file to appear to have artwork in iTunes is to have another format of the same album that accepts artwork. Or one track converted to alac from that album, then iTunes will associate the art with the WAV files.

 

[steve dixon]

i bow to your superior knowledge gents, you are right .wav won't support artwork, fortunately i'd only ripped about a dozen albums, so i erased the external hdd, changed itunes import setting to AIFF and now all is well again, yes i know i could convert formats, but i want to start as i mean to go on.

 

strange that amarra suggest using wav then? i've followed their advice so far, i.e. ssd internal, hdd external for storage, to produce a quieter music server. it seems though that they got that wav thing a bit wrong, unless they don't use itunes but prefer something else?

 

i'm just glad i didn't get to 300 ripped albums before this 'glitch' manifested itself.

 

thanks

steve