About This Blog

This "iTunes Notes" blog is about using iTunes.

iTunes is a lot harder to use than you might think, mainly because it's so "simple." The problem with things designed to be simple to use is that they actually hide a huge amount of complexity. I find that my iTunes use sometimes runs into problems because of all the hidden complexity.

For one thing, my brain is not as capacious as it used to be, so I'm apt to make stupid mistakes, such as losing track of the iTunes Preferences settings I want to use and either changing them inappropriately or failing to change them back when I need to.

(In iTunes Preferences: Advanced, the "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" and "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" options make a big difference in how iTunes handles new items that you add to your library. The latter option determines whether adding new items causes copies of those items to be placed within the iTunes Music folder hierarchy as "managed" files, or whether the original files are left in place as merely "referenced" files. If the former option is checked, then the files that iTunes uses, whether "managed" or "referenced," are subject to being modified in various ways that help iTunes keep track of them for you. If you have a very large iTunes library — and I do — you may have media files strewn over multiple hard drives and accordingly may need to disable the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" option. If that is the case, there still may be times when you want to "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" anyway, necessitating re-enabling that option temporarily. Once you are finished doing whatever it is that you intend to do with that option enabled, you must remember to put it back in its customarily disabled state. I typically forget to do that.)

There are also things that iTunes supposedly can do well but actually does rather poorly, such as helping you manage and eliminate duplicate tracks.

Then there are the many things iTunes does quite well ... so many of them, I'm always forgetting how best to take advantage of them.


For those and other reasons, I find I'm continually needing to "look under the hood" of iTunes to accomplish tasks that most people never run into.

For instance, I have two Apple TVs that I use with iTunes, and I find that using an Apple TV can cause (usually minor) problems that might never crop up otherwise. For some reason, just to take one example, Apple TV seems to balk at discovering some of the album artwork that nonetheless seems to be present in iTunes' database.

Again, at this point I am just trying to give you an example of why we sometimes need to look under the hood. One possible solution to the problem I just mentioned, or so I believed, was to make sure that all my MP3 files contain the latest version of the ID3 tags that hold crucial information such as the name of the track, the name of the album, etc. — (sometimes, but not always) including the album art (if any) associated with the track.

If you select an MP3 track in your Music Library in iTunes and do a Command-I to bring up its Information panel, then click on Summary, you can check which ID3 Tag version the track uses. If it's anything lower than v2.4, it isn't the latest.

I have oodles of tracks that use v2.3, and some use the even older v2.2. Some of the tracks whose album art doesn't show up on Apple TV had ID3 tags older than v2.4, so I decided to update the tags. By selecting those particular tracks in iTunes and using Ctrl-Click to pop up a contextual menu, I was able to choose Convert ID3 Tags ... from that menu and then update the selected tracks to v2.4. That worked pretty well, with the result that album art that Apple TV formerly couldn't find suddenly began to appear on Apple TV.


So then I figured it would be a good idea to make sure that all my MP3 tracks use ID3 v2.4 tags.

Big mistake.

For reasons I don't fully understand, a huge number of tracks that had earlier ID3 versions, when converted by iTunes to v2.4, stopped showing their album art entirely, even in iTunes!

In trying to recover from that fiasco, I learned an awful lot of things that I never really wanted to know about iTunes album art. Much of it is useful information, at least in certain situations. Some of it can actually make your life easier, once you learn to take it account.

I'll be discussing more about album art and a host of other fairly advanced iTunes topics in this blog.

When I say "advanced," I actually mean that this is stuff about iTunes that I personally find challenging, whereas you might find the same stuff elementary.


On the other hand, I'm not going to spend a lot of time explaining what I take to be the basics of iTunes.

Unfortunately, iTunes is so richly complex that even its basics fill every one of the several iTunes/iPod/iPhone reference books that your local or online bookstore can sell you. I have thumbed through several of these, and although they all have a lot of strong points, none of them say much of anything about the "under the hood" details of how iTunes handles album art.

For instance, I found little if any mention of the differences between how current versions of iTunes (iTunes 7 and later) handle album art and how older versions did.

Older versions, as a default, stored all album art in ID3 tags in individual MP3 files. Each file of a multi-file album contained a separate copy of the album art.

Starting with version 7 of iTunes, the default behavior changed. Instead of putting the album art in each individual file, iTunes 7 (and later versions) store a single copy of it in a separate Album Artwork folder.

If you import MP3 music that violates iTunes' current assumptions about where and how album art is stored — maybe it was created under an earlier iTunes version, or by software other than iTunes — it's all supposed to work.

But I found that that doesn't always happen.

Thus the need to look "under the hood" sometimes.

More about that in subsequent posts to this blog!