Programmatically Fetch iTunes Album Art

by John Biggs on September 19, 2006

Pretty cool little hack. Jesper Nøhr created a perl library – and others have created Python and PHP versions – of a system to grab iTunes album art on the fly for almost any application. As an exercise for you, our readers, we encourage you to post links to amazing scripts you’ve written using this API. We might even make it a contest, so get cracking. Everyone is asleep at work after lunch anyway.

iTunes 7: Fetching artwork for fun and profit [Printf]

Anonymous - September 19th, 2006 at 10:31 am GMT+5

Scan all the mp3 on your computer with this script, and auto-get their artwork:
http://tom.zickel.org/getartwork/

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Michael Vincent Wood - September 19th, 2006 at 12:41 pm GMT+5

i dont know if yall havent been paying attention or what but as of sept. 12 itunes will do it for you.

also i used to know of a site where you could tpe in an artist and album name and it would find you the artwork totally free with no hassles.

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Anonymous - September 19th, 2006 at 12:48 pm GMT+5

a. did you even read the purpose of this post ? to show that there are alternative ways, and to use them.

b. who wants to install itunes ?

c. installing itunes isnt enough, you need to register an account at the ITMS.

d. itunes might work in a diffrent way, which can yeild diffrent results.

e. this is free as well, entering thousands of names and trying to sort them, and put where is needed manually, isnt smart, especially when you have a small script that does the work for you..

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webonics - September 19th, 2006 at 9:08 pm GMT+5

This script sounds pretty cool. Unfortunately, it appears the author has removed the page or maybe the host removed because of all the crunchgear traffic. I’m not sure why the author chose perl (or even python) but I’m going to look around for a similar PHP or ColdFusion script and maybe add this to my site(s) and blog. Thanks for the tip-off.

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Anonymous - September 20th, 2006 at 3:03 am GMT+5

The page is back long ago, with all the code… in the comments, you can find code snippets for C#, Ruby, Java, PHP, Python and more (that does the same)… The author chose perl, because I persume, it’s the language he is most comftarble in…

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Jesper - September 25th, 2006 at 4:58 am GMT+5

I am the author. And my name is Jesper Nøhr, not Jasper Nehr :-)

Anyway, I wrote it in Perl since it started out as a proof of concept, and left the porting up to people more talented in the respectable languages. I’ve created a small project page listing the various languages and a handful of applications already using them;

http://avantlumiere.com/projects/i7awf/

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