This is spawned from this thread:
http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=310578#Post310578Are there any suggestions for native Mac tagging utilities that will pull album art automatically and embed it in the id3 tag? If not, I'll just run MediaMonkey with Parallels.
Ya, iTunes. There are no stand-alone tagging programs for the Mac worth downloading, let alone purchasing. ITunes is a far better tagger (easier to use, especially with large collections) than most Windows stand-alone programs. Its biggest drawbacks are not handling anything outside MP3, AAC and Apple Lossless plus its lack of support for arbitrary or extended tags. Ok, it also can't browse your music by directory structure, so if you're dealing with completely untagged files, you're going to want to import them a few at a time into temporary playlists or keep a second library just for tagging purposes (so the music doesn't get lost within your existing collection).
When you do an automatic album art download in iTunes it will not include the artwork in the MP3 file itself as a tag. Yes, this is what you said. However, it's easy to automatically put the downloaded image into every tune in your collection. Or any number of tunes since you can just select the ones you want to perform that action on.
I think I was the first person to post about the manual method of accomplishing this and then a couple of people created AppleScripts to do it automatically. Basically what you're going to do is copy the image from the selected tune and then paste it into its artwork tag.
Manual method:
http://twistedmelon.com/blog/sep2006.html#09230601AppleScript to do this:
tell application "iTunes"
repeat with aTrack in selection
repeat with anArtwork in artworks of aTrack
if downloaded of anArtwork is true then
set theData to data of anArtwork
set data of anArtwork to theData
end if
end repeat
end repeat
end tell
Open ScriptEditor, paste that into a new window and then save it with the name you'd like. You then copy it into the Scripts Folder for iTunes for your user (located at ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts).
If you check
http://dougscripts.com you will find other variations on this method as well as a lot of other scripts to make your tagging in iTunes much more pleasant. For instance, Search and Replace within tags, Remove n Characters, Proper English Capitalization, Albumize Selection, etc... I can give a full list of the scripts I have installed if anyone would like to see.
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