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A better way to get cover art into iTunes database
Authored by: spl23 on Sep 10, '08 05:32:16AM

Still more detail...all bad news, I fear.

The cover art process seems to have changed a lot with iTunes 8. Cover art is now delivered from the store in a file with an ITC2 extension rather than an ITC extension. ITC files were just JPEGs with a header, but the JPEG data in an ITC2 file is encrypted - if you strip the header, the resulting JPEG is the right size but is full of garbage.

The query process for getting artwork from the store has gone to another level of complexity - the query is sent to one address, the response identifies a file, and this is downloaded from a different address. There also seems to be a crypto key associated with the request for artwork, although I guess that this could be ignored on a local server (unless the key is what is used to encrypt the JPEG data).

The iTunes library file is still encrypted and no-one knows the format, so that isn't a sensible approach for hacking. I've tried substituting different JPEG data into an ITC2 file, but iTunes just deletes the file as corrupt.

It would seem that iTunes 8 means that the only way to get artwork into the database is to download it properly from the ITMS, which means we are back to being at the mercy of Apple with low quality, poorly-formatted, wrong or absent covers. Not a step forward - I think I shall be sticking with my 160GB iPod classic for the forseeable future.



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A better way to get cover art into iTunes database
Authored by: jweber on Sep 13, '08 09:52:55PM
I've updated the script for iTunes 8:
http://www.jacobweber.com/scripts/coverArt1.3.tar


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