iTunes Backup Question

[Charles Elms]

I recently migrated a couple of thousand tracks of music from Windows Media Player into the itunes environment. I know where iTunes stores the music and I can back that up to an external hard drive like I do with Windows Media.

 

Here is the question. I spent a lot of time moving album art into the itunes environment. The art is not stored in the music folder. Where is the art stored and how can I back it up to an external hard drive? Do I have to do anything special to restore the itunes library. There are no DRM issues here as all my music is original on CD.

 

Appreciate any information on this.

[ghaverkamp]

I assume you're on Windows?

 

In that case, I don't know 100%, but on the Mac, in the topmost iTunes library directory, I have a directory called "Album Artwork."

[smiller]

Just FYI, album art is frequently embedded in the music file itself so you may see album art when you play a track even if there are no separate image files stored anywhere.

[Charles Elms]

Thanks, I've got one too. Guess I was looking for something that had the .jpg or .bmp images like you have in WMP. I'll just back that up with everything else and hope for the best. My ultimate backup for album art will be in my WMA library.

 

Be nice if the itunes backup utility would let you go to hard drive and not CD/DVD.

[SeanC]

When you say you moved album art into the iTunes environment, what method did you use? If you selected a track (or group of tracks, i.e., an album), chose the "Get Info" command, clicked the "Artwork" tab and pasted the album art, it is saved directly to the song's tag. This is the method I prefer because I can move the songs to any computer, device or other music player without having to worry about the artwork. It makes the files a little bigger, but who cares.

 

If you chose the iTunes "Get Album Artwork" command, the artwork is not saved to the song's tag, but rather in the \iTunes\Album Artwork\ directory in a non-standard, iTunes-only format (.itc files). This artwork appears in Get Info, but it is not stored in the song's tag (you can force it to, but it's a manual process that involves cutting it from Get Info, clicking OK, choosing Get Info again and pasting it back in).

 

If you plan on sticking with iTunes forever, the Get Album Artwork command is fine. Just let iTunes manage it and make sure to backup the entire \iTunes directory.

 

The music player I prefer over iTunes (for Windows anyway) is MediaMonkey. Its artwork and ID3 tag management/synchronization features are far superior to iTunes. You can use it with iTunes, and it even reads certain iTunes (and/or Windows Media Player) info when it can't find it on its own.

[smiller]

The music player I prefer over iTunes (for Windows anyway) is MediaMonkey. Its artwork and ID3 tag management/synchronization features are far superior to iTunes. You can use it with iTunes, and it even reads certain iTunes (and/or Windows Media Player) info when it can't find it on its own.

I'll second a MediaMonkey recommendation. As Sean noted it's superior to iTunes or WMP in terms of tagging and library management, is highly configurable, free, and works with almost any player brand. To me the best feature is that it's relatively small and manageable, not the massive pieces of bloatware that iTunes and WMP have become.