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Automated 5800 Album Art solution for Mac users

3 replies · 10,484 views · Started 05 March 2009

I've spent all evening working on this... thought I'd share it with everyone.

Right... using iTunes on the mac to automatically download album art for my mp3's... then transferring these mp3s to my 5800.... no album art shows up. Familiar story I am sure.

So I manually add the art using on the phone and it shows up. But it's tiny!

The best size for album art on 5800 is 500x500 pixels.

I've made some scripts which will take a selection of tracks in iTunes with album art that has been downloaded from iTunes and embed it into the mp3's in the perfect format for a 5800.

Here are the directions..

0. You need Leopard and iTunes 8
1. In iTunes select a group of mp3s with no existing album art.
2. right click , choose get album art.
3. run the 'Export album art' script... jpegs are saved to desktop. Keep selection in iTunes!
4. Open the Resize Jpeg action, Select all these jpegs on desktop and run Resize Jpeg action (in that order)... jpegs are resized and re-saved.
5. Run Embed Art script and choose all the newly-created artwork on the desktop.
6. It will be embedded into the correct mp3's in your iTunes library.
7. Use Nokia Multimedia Transfer to copy the mp3's across to 5800 without transcoding.
8. Voila!

If iTunes doesn't have the art you need, put your manually found artwork on the desktop in jpeg format with name [Artist|Album.jpg] and it will be included from there on. Or before stage 3 manually add it to the mp3s.

Let me know any problems.

Also posted on Symbian Freak

Thanks to various sources including Doug's applescripts for examples.

New version of scripts 18:24 5th March
New version of scripts 23:18 17th April

3 separate files now as one archive is too big to post.

Attachments: Embed Art.app.zip (128 KB) Resize Jpeg.app.zip (296 KB) Export Artwork.app.zip (45 KB)

Just one problem. When the album title contains a colon ( : ) the export artwork script fails. Removing the colon makes the script work for that albums.

Yes that is an issue. Also sometimes the 2 'change type of image' actions in the Automator script don't work and the files are left as 980kB 'jpegs' (not sure what they really are) but you don't want to embed these to your mp3s as they are huge. If it works properly (which it normally does) you will hear the sound of a file being trashed twice per album artwork. Keep trying again till it works. Sometimes you have to rename the album then go through the process then name it back again. A bit of a pain but it works. Not got the time/skills to fix these probs.