Beautifying your iTunes Library

Beautifying iTunes

13 September 2008 592 views 4 Comments

Okay, I assume you have all your video and music files imported into iTunes, maybe even with the help of VideoDrive.

Now you might still be dissatisfied with the looks of your library. VideoDrive utilized Amazon for cover art, but their images are often not very pretty. So here are some resources you can exploit to make your iTunes look stunning:

This forum thread at macrumors features some self-created artwork which is absolutely stunning. Best: you don’t need to register to access the images. Thanks to all those creative people for sharing!
For TV Shows, use this AMAZING link solution provided by Josh. You get the exact same artwork as is displayed on iTunes. (Easier way for music here.)
And for all other desires, check out Get Video Artwork.

Now, that is all for the eye. But in case you need to change some hard facts, say, in the description of your imported files, there are two ways:

Use VideoDrive’s feature “Add Meta Data”. You can use that option for files which already have meta data and for those which are completely ‘naked’. You cannot, however, access the “Description” field in iTunes directly.
Use one of Doug’s apple scripts. [German readers, over here!] The rest, search here.

There you go. Enjoy beautifying your iTunes library.

4 Comments »

AgentSmith said:

Oh, one of my favorite topics. :mrgreen:
I am very fussy about my movies and tv series in iTunes – i do everything manually. I check on Amazon.com what the official DVD-Cover is and won’t rest until i find a high resolution image of it. Then i open it up in photoshop to resize to my desired resolution, so that _all_ my covers have the exact same resolution and aspect ratio.
I take the tags and information from Wikipedia, also completely manual.

Takes a lot of time, but feels damn good when you’re looking at the video section in iTunes.. :)

I described it here in greater detail some time ago, btw.

Reply

Starstuff Reply:
September 19th, 2008 at 7:18 am

Good morning, Agent Smith!

I am fussy about my library as well, but to be honest: I am not that patient to do everything manually. Especially with the TV shows that is just taking up too much time. Therefor, I am a very grateful and happy VideoDrive user – no manual fiddling anymore ;)

About your blogpost: I actually took your advice on the tags in the commentary field. I have so many movies, some of them are ion English, some are in German, some have two audio tracks. It was getting difficult for me to remember the settings for each movie. So I put
/Audio: English/
/Audio: German/
in the commentary to create playlists based on the language. Why on earth I didn’t figure that one out myself is anybody’s guess, but you really saved my life with that (ok, you saved my movie nights with friends ;) Now I don’t have to click on each and every movie to find one in German for my friends.)

Reply

AgentSmith Reply:
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:29 pm

Yep, those “self-implemented” tags using the comment-field are really, really useful. That’s the good thing about tags: You can come up with almost any information you want to be able to categorize your data by. :)

Reply

# 19 September 2008 at 4:54 am

CollegeGuy said:

Great write up on VideoDrive – I’ve been looking for a program that does exactly what it does (converting in iSquint took *way* too long). I also wanted to suggest a program called MetaX, as the only thing that VideoDrive isn’t quite good at is finding good tag data (althoug the IMDB stuff is certainly functional) and definitely not that good with the artwork.

Reply

# 21 October 2008 at 8:45 am