Is it possible to make iTunes album artwork visible via MinimServer?

[DavidL]

Having searched the forum for an answer without success, it may be that this is just a naive question from a new user of MinimServer but I'll press on.

I've just changed from music stored on a computer Firewire hard disk and played remotely with iTunes (airplay) to music stored on a Synology DS412+ NAS as a self-contained iTunes library (i.e. .itl file and media files) which I access using MinimServer installed on the NAS to serve music files to a remote renderer (ethernet-to-SPDIF) controlled by an iOS app. I have retained the iTunes library form so that I can add new music, and edit meta data with iTunes.

My question concerns the album art which iTunes stores in a file separate from the music files. Is there any way I can get MinimServer to access this file of album art? At the moment I'm using the Audionet controller. This picks up some album art associated with a few ALAC music files, presumably because it had been embedded in the few music files I acquired as downloads (iTunes gift tokens). The great majority of the files in my music library has been obtained by ripping CDs to ALAC; the majority of these tracks have album art obtained by the iTunes menu Library internet search which I guess is stored in the separate Album Art file.

I could manually edit the meta data for each track to include album art but this would take far too long (60k tracks). In common with others, as stated in earlier threads, my main interest is the music so I'm prepared to ditch the album art if a large effort is required to integrate it into the music library.

Thanks in advance for any guidance; perhaps some one can point me in the right direction.

[simoncn]

(26-01-2014 21:15)DavidL Wrote:  Having searched the forum for an answer without success, it may be that this is just a naive question from a new user of MinimServer but I'll press on.

I've just changed from music stored on a computer Firewire hard disk and played remotely with iTunes (airplay) to music stored on a Synology DS412+ NAS as a self-contained iTunes library (i.e. .itl file and media files) which I access using MinimServer installed on the NAS to serve music files to a remote renderer (ethernet-to-SPDIF) controlled by an iOS app. I have retained the iTunes library form so that I can add new music, and edit meta data with iTunes.

My question concerns the album art which iTunes stores in a file separate from the music files. Is there any way I can get MinimServer to access this file of album art? At the moment I'm using the Audionet controller. This picks up some album art associated with a few ALAC music files, presumably because it had been embedded in the few music files I acquired as downloads (iTunes gift tokens). The great majority of the files in my music library has been obtained by ripping CDs to ALAC; the majority of these tracks have album art obtained by the iTunes menu Library internet search which I guess is stored in the separate Album Art file.

I could manually edit the meta data for each track to include album art but this would take far too long (60k tracks). In common with others, as stated in earlier threads, my main interest is the music so I'm prepared to ditch the album art if a large effort is required to integrate it into the music library.

Thanks in advance for any guidance; perhaps some one can point me in the right direction.

At present, MinimServer doesn't know how to read the separate iTunes album art file. I haven't done any investigation to find out how hard this would be.

This is a possible enhancement for a future release, but there are many things ahead of it on the priority list.

[DavidL]

Thanks for the quick reply Simon.

I certainly agree that provision in MinimServer of access to the iTunes album art file should not be a priority.
I'll investigate other options for getting the album art into my library.

[DavidL]

I've solved my problem by using a Doug Script:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss...bumartjpeg
This script is easy to add to iTunes and simple to use: I've already done more than 10k tracks. I'd recommend it to anyone else with the same requirement.

I have Benedikt at Audionet to thank for pointing me in the right direction.

David

[davids]

Just to add that this is an excellent solution. I wasted a lot of time adding album art to individual tracks before discovering this post. As DavidL says, it's easy to install, has a free ten day trial for and only costs $1.99. Thank you DavidL and Benedikt.