iTunes album art must die.

October 22, 2010 11:20 AM

iTunes 10.0.1 and Windows Vista. Help me kill the album art, kill it dead, for good. Permanently. For, like, EVER.

I've searched previous questions and Googled endlessly and can find no straightforward step-by-step guide. I would like to remove all album art that iTunes has downloaded, and prevent the program from ever adding any again.

I have unchecked the "automatically download missing album art" box. I have gone through my iTunes library and deleted anything ending in .jpg. Still, every time I add music to my library I get a "processing album artwork" message and sure enough, some entirely unrelated artwork shows up.

I've been told there's something that can be done via the command prompt, but I'm not even sure how to go about finding current, reliable step by step instructions on how to do this. Everything I see on the web seems to be a couple years old.

So - Windows Vista users, have you done this? And if so, can you walk me through it? Thanks in advance for your help.

posted by chez shoes to Technology (12 answers total)

Best answer: Hard to answer your question, as you leave out a key piece of info: How are you obtaining music? If you buy from iTunes, it's going to download album art no matter what (the checkbox you describe only pertains to songs already in your collection). If you torrent or obtain MP3s by some other means, those files may have art embedded into them. (I expect this is the case, otherwise you wouldn't likely be getting "entirely unrelated" artwork.)

This brings us to the other key distinction you may not be aware of. Unless it's changed in the recent version, iTunes stores one copy of the JPG in an unbelievable labyrinth of folders within your iTunes folder, and somehow associates that JPG with the song or songs it belongs to. This is proprietary and weird. The more logical way is to embed the JPG right into each and every MP3 file. Yes, it means more storage space, but even for a large collection, it's negligible in these days of Tbyte drives. And if you ever move your MP3s to another player, that player will be able to comprehend the embedded art. iTunes does allow you to embed the art into each file, but it's a manual process that requires you to use the "Get info" dialog box.

I use iCoverArt from Maximized Software to periodically comb through the whole library, find any instances of downloaded artwork that may have crept in, and embed those images into the MP3s. But from the description, the program would probably help you bring some order into your world by sorting out which files have downloaded art, no art, or embedded art, and allowing you to make changes as you see fit. The program is only $5 and you can try it free (the free version only does 5 songs at a time).

You may even find that once you can control the artwork, you won't want to kill it all dead forever.
posted by dust of the stars at 1:02 PM on October 22, 2010

One way of making the maintenance easier [assuming you can't find the master OFF switch and truly DO NOT WANT artwork] would be to create a smart playlist: "Has artwork = True"

Once in a while, select everything in that playlist, get info, check the box next to the empty artwork box, and click OK.
posted by chazlarson at 2:51 PM on October 22, 2010

This is just an iTunes thing. If you're not buying from iTunes, have you considered using another iPod manager ? For Windows, I'm pretty fond of Sharepod. It saved my music collection (formerly trapped on a non-internet desktop).
posted by klausman at 3:33 PM on October 22, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers thus far! Some answers and questions:

How are you obtaining music?

Rarely (but sometimes) via iTunes, mostly from CD or LP rips. I delete any .jpgs before adding them to my library though - is there a way the artwork can be embedded directly in the .mp3 file?

You may even find that once you can control the artwork, you won't want to kill it all dead forever.

Controlling the artwork is a step in the right direction, but honestly - I don't see the point of having it in the first place. The first time I manually deleted all of the artwork from my iTunes (35,000+ songs) I freed up 3 gigs of space - which is not insignificant given the limited capacity of the iPod (which is where I have the space concern, not on my computer so much). It's not like I would ever want to look at the artwork while listening to my iPod - I just can't wrap my head around the point of having the artwork in the first place.

I use iCoverArt from Maximized Software

Any idea if I can use this to just delete all artwork and keep it deleted? For five bucks it's worth a try I suppose :)

assuming you can't find the master OFF switch and truly DO NOT WANT artwork

I really, truly, do not want artwork. Really!

select everything in that playlist, get info, check the box next to the empty artwork box, and click OK

Thanks, I've done that. The next time I sync my iPod, it adds it all back in. This is what I'm perplexed by the most - why I can delete the artwork, free up the space, only to have it added back in by something on the back end. Whatever that "something" is, I'd like to disable.
posted by chez shoes at 3:33 PM on October 22, 2010

Response by poster: have you considered using another iPod manager ?

I haven't, but maybe it's time. I'll look into the one you recommended. The main reason I've stuck with iTunes is the compression to AAC format - it allows me to shrink my 300-odd-GB music collection to fit onto a 160GB iPod.
posted by chez shoes at 3:35 PM on October 22, 2010

You will have to do this every time you get new art... but just select ALL your music in iTunes and 'Get Info' on it. Then take an image of a single white pixel or something and place that in the "Album Art" area. You will now have blank (well, a single white pixel) art.

Although for the life of me I don't know why you would want to get rid of it. I have spent hours just finding the right album art.
posted by darkgroove at 3:51 PM on October 22, 2010

Response by poster: Although for the life of me I don't know why you would want to get rid of it. I have spent hours just finding the right album art.

I like the single pixel idea - thanks! But I'm curious - what purpose does the album art serve? I'm probably as baffled as to why you would want it as you are about why I don't :)
posted by chez shoes at 4:08 PM on October 22, 2010

what purpose does the album art serve

Ultimately it's something pretty to look at. It's a throwback to the olden days when senior citizens like me used to put a record on the turntable and sit down to listen and look at the album sleeve.

Looking at my iPhone and seeing some song playing with that big ol' music note just seems totally wrong and broken at some visceral level.

Coverflow view is pretty boring without album art.

I'm with darkgroove. It's an album, it should have art. An album without album art is incomplete.

The next time I sync my iPod, it adds it all back in

Now that, I've never seen. I've made tag changes, synced the iThing, and had all tag changes stick. Of course, I've not tried to remove artwork but I have set large groups of songs to the same placeholder album art image and that's stuck.

You're not somehow stripping the album art from the songs on the iPod rather than the songs in the library, are you? I could see that causing the symptom you describe [though honestly I'm not sure how you'd do that, so it may be a red herring].
posted by chazlarson at 5:16 PM on October 22, 2010

Response by poster: Ultimately it's something pretty to look at. It's a throwback to the olden days when senior citizens like me used to put a record on the turntable and sit down to listen and look at the album sleeve.

Funny thing - as someone, er, advanced in age myself, I would totally get it if the *liner notes* were viewable (and enlargeable), as I would spend happy hours perusing these in the pre-CD days. CDs, not so much, thanks to the teeny tiny type.

Looking at my iPhone and seeing some song playing with that big ol' music note just seems totally wrong and broken at some visceral level.

Maybe that's the thing - I've got an iPod Classic. Not in the habit of looking at it except to choose a song or whatever. Now this is starting to make sense to me - in old versions of iTunes, there used to be a checkbox to disable album art, IIRC. But now that the program is geared more toward iPhone users, this option no longer exists. Stands to reason, if more of their target market is using iTunes on their phone and actually looking at it while standing in lines or whatever.

You're not somehow stripping the album art from the songs on the iPod rather than the songs in the library, are you?

Definitely not, I'm stripping the .jpg files out of my Music and iTunes folders on my computer. I've got the automatically add album art checkbox UNCHECKED, but after I manually deleted all the .jpgs, silly iTunes went and added album art anyway. And it makes no sense. The Kinks Face to Face showing up as the artwork for, say, a Billie Holiday song.
posted by chez shoes at 5:39 PM on October 22, 2010

Response by poster: dust of the stars, thanks a million! I think iCoverArt is going to do the trick - just tried it on 5 files and it worked. Now I just have to wait for them to send me the registration key and run it on the other 36,591 files.
posted by chez shoes at 7:54 PM on October 22, 2010

Best answer: I'm stripping the .jpg files out of my Music and iTunes folders

So far as I know, iTunes doesn't use any jpg files for storing album art. It either stores the art in and ID3 tag within the file itself or as some opaque private format. I've got an enormous iTunes library here; almost every track has album art, and there are no jpg files in either the music directory on the external drive [with the MP3s] or in the iTunes data directory [with the iTunes Library file] in my home:

K:\music\Music>dir /s/b *.jpg
File Not Found

K:\music\Music>c:

C:\Windows\System32>cd \Users\Chaz\Music\iTunes

C:\Users\Chaz\Music\iTunes>dir /s/b *.jpg
File Not Found

There are, however, about 6500 "*.itc2" files in "\Users\Chaz\Music\iTunes\Album Artwork".

My point is that in deleting jpg files you quite possibly aren't deleting what you think you're deleting. iTunes probably isn't even noticing that they are gone.

The Kinks Face to Face showing up as the artwork for, say, a Billie Holiday song.

I have seen some bad automated search results, too, but I think the artwork coming back is a red herring. I think you maybe haven't been deleting it at all, and when you resync, iTunes just refreshes the artwork with the cached itc2s it already has. The "Get Info then paste in a one-pixel image" method should clear all those files, as well.

Sounds like you've found a solution with iCoverArt, though.
posted by chazlarson at 8:27 AM on October 25, 2010

Response by poster: My point is that in deleting jpg files you quite possibly aren't deleting what you think you're deleting. iTunes probably isn't even noticing that they are gone.

Ding ding ding ding ding! I had no idea that in addition to album cover .jpgs, there was another way that images were stored. So going forward this is good to know.

But yeah - iCoverArt worked like a charm. Thanks again to dust of the stars for the recommendation, and to AskMe in general for solving my problem :)
posted by chez shoes at 12:35 PM on October 25, 2010