Export Album Art for Rockbox - Requesting iTunes OSX testers

[kps]

I've written an iTunes script, here, to extract and convert album art into Windows BMP files that Rockbox understands. I have not used Applescript much, and have only run this script on my own files, so I'm looking for people willing to try it out before I make it more publicly available.

I wrote this on OS X 10.5.6 and iTunes 8; I don't know which older versions it might also work with.

To install the script, download the zip file, extract it, and put the file in it (Export Album Art for Rockbox) into your ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder.

To run the script, select some tracks and invoke the script from iTunes script menu. (If no tracks are selected, it should run on the current playlist, but this hasn't been tested much.) It will ask for an image size in pixels, defaulting to 100. For tracks that belong to an album, it will create an image file "cover.sizexsize.bmp" taken from the first selected track that has album art. For tracks that don't belong to an album, it will create individual image files "filename.sizexsize.bmp".

There are some other options that are currently not exposed, and haven't really been tested; they can only be used by editing the properties at the top of the script:

• export_every_track: create a "filename.sizexsize.bmp" for every track, rather than one image per album
• overwrite_existing_files: replace existing album art files, if any
• image_name_uses_album: use the album ID3 name rather than "cover" for album images
• image_name_uses_size: (don't) add "sizexsize" to the file name

Important: This script is free, but it might be worth less than you paid for it. Don't blame me if it destroys the universe. You have backups, right?

[Llorean]

Why is it creating sizexsize versions of the files? Those shouldn't be necessary any more, since we have scaling.

[kps]

Perhaps that should be off by default, or at least exposed in a dialog, but I used that form for two reasons:

• 1. It lets you see at a glance the size of the album art on the player, and
• 2. If you use multiple themes with different sizes, and have the disk space, then (for example) a 100x100 image generated from a large original source usually looks a lot better than a 100x100 image generated from a 160x160 image.

[saratoga]

Resizing on the PC is probably of higher quality, so I guess its not entirely pointless.

[Llorean]

I'm not sure, but I think you can still fail to find album art if there's no cover.bmp and only size-specific ones. It may be higher quality on the PC, but the quality isn't bad at all in Rockbox. A single 300x300 or 400x400 file or so is probably good enough for the vast majority of cases.

[kps]

I'm not sure, but I think you can still fail to find album art if there's no cover.bmp and only size-specific ones.

That's true; probably the best thing to do, when using multiple sizes, is to have the largest one named cover.bmp. Having the script generate multiple sizes would add a lot of complications, though, and Applescript is a nuisance to write, so I may just end up following your original suggestion and default to cover.bmp alone.

[spike66]

kps, have you checked http://vcardenasblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/ipod-album-art-extracter-for-rockbox.html and http://vcardenasblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/album-art-extracter-for-rockbox.html found in http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/AlbumArt#Useful_tools ? It's for Windows, not an iTunes script, but the result seems to be very similar