Set Custom iTunes Genre Art
Sep 22, 2009 - 5 Comments
I have a million different genres in iTunes and not nearly enough album art, which is fine and dandy until you put iTunes 9 into genre ‘grid’ view and then suddenly you have a bunch of boring looking music note icons. Apparently how iTunes sets genre art is by looking for album art set in that genre, and if it can’t find any album art it will resort to the boring grey box. But not anymore! Thanks to a crafty Mac user, you can now change those dull music note icons into virtually any image you want, which dramatically spruces up your iTunes grid view appearance. Highly recommended iTunes tweaking! Check out the how-to guide here:
@Twelves: Have you tried using that application with iTunes 9? I did, guess what. It didn’t work. If you had actually read the article I wrote, you would have read that I had, in fact, searched the Internet looking for a solution, of any kind, to the problem and found nothing.
I used a couple of programs out there for the purpose of adding custom Genre Art. The one you mentioned and iGenres. Both applications work great for iTunes 8.x, but have not been updated to work with iTunes 9.x. It’s not very clear that they will be updated either. Both developers haven’t done much with the apps for about a year and one doesn’t even run the website linked to by MacUpdate.
Trust me, I don’t consider myself a “Hacker” by any means. Adding custom Genre art is not all that hackerish. You simply copy JPG’s into a folder and edit a text file. Not really all that difficult. It’s not like its necessary to use Terminal or Xcode to make the changes. Backing up before making the changes is always a good idea no matter what change you are making. Even with other programs.
Nice tip but this is over complicating things which is great for hackers but for the average user you can just use an application to do this, like iTunes Genre Art Manager, it’s open source and cross platform for Windows and Mac OS X
http://genreman.sourceforge.net/
@jafar: If this is “sooooo old”, how come I couldn’t find any how-to’s on the web for doing it? Having to figure it out for myself told me that there must be a need for it.
Also, how could it be “sooooo old” if iTunes 9.0 just came out a few weeks ago? I can’t speak for iTunes 8.x and how that version can be augmented for custom Genre Artwork, but I couldn’t find any info on iTunes 9.0 so I decided it was time to figure it out.
Plus, just because it’s old, doesn’t mean that there are hundreds if not thousands that have never seen it. There are new Macintosh owners all the time and they might want to know this kind of information.
DUDE! this is sooooo old!! i figured it out myself like 1000 years ago lol!
Hey, thanks for the mention!