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FLAC Album Art Discrepancy (iTunes)

L

leerkeller

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 1, 2011
96
0
Baltimore, MD
I have had a few FLAC encoded albums in my itunes library for a while. I had just assumed that they were incompatible with attached album art. During a recent iTunes upgrade I noticed that quite a few of my regular mp3 album had been stripped of artwork. That led me to try the Get Album Artwork function. I was suprised to find that it worked and replaced all of the album artwork, and not just for the regular mp3/aac files. There was now album artwork for my FLAC albums. I first thought that this new version of iTunes allowed me to attach art to my FLAC files. I quickly realized this was an incorrect assumption when I tried to change artwork for Electric Ladyland from the censored US version that was fetched by the GAA function to a high resolution copy of the original UK artwork. When I selected Get Info for the album the artwork section was accessable (not darkened as it was before) and I pasted the new artwork in. Immediately after that I noticed that Electric Ladyland was once again showing up as a question mark. When I went back into Get Info for the album the artwork heading was blacked out and inaccessable. I had to run the Get Album Artwork function again to get the US cover art back.

This leads to the question. Is there some workaround that would allow me to attach artwork to FLAC files in iTunes? The images automatically assigned by iTunes are lacking in many aspects, from bad color correction and contrast to poor cropping and low resolution. It is better than having nothing appear but I would like to be able to have the high resolution, accurate album art that are attached to all the other non-Flac files in iTunes.
iTunes 11.0.4, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
 
Elven

Elven

macrumors 6502a
May 13, 2008
862
1
UK
How did you get iTunes to accept FLAC files? when I try on ML it just ignores the request when I drag and drop the album over iTunes.
 
K

kryten2

macrumors 65816
Mar 17, 2012
1,114
99
Belgium
Perhaps you can do something with this :

OK so the problem is that iTunes 11, when asked to "Get Album Artwork" downloads it and stores it in a folder called "Album Artwork" in a proprietary format instead of embedding the artwork into each file as does every other artwork program on earth.
Click to expand...

Found here
 
jameskachan

jameskachan

macrumors member
Aug 16, 2008
59
13
Toronto, Canada
id just transcode to Apple lossless format from Flac

I take any flac and transcode it to APPL Lossless.
The file stays entirely intact, there is no loss of quality whatsoever.

Any software that can play FLAC is going to play Apple Lossless as well.
And I use apple stuff so why not?

I use the free and awesomely powerful (and often updated) XLD.app to do this.
No hacks or workarounds.

Much better..
 
A

ayres

macrumors 6502
Sep 27, 2010
290
50
I second this...

it's been a while since I last tried fluke... I like the idea, but let's face it - iTunes doesn't play nice with others. once I discovered xld to convert to apple lossless, I saw no reason to keep flac.

jameskachan said:
I take any flac and transcode it to APPL Lossless.
The file stays entirely intact, there is no loss of quality whatsoever.

Any software that can play FLAC is going to play Apple Lossless as well.
And I use apple stuff so why not?

I use the free and awesomely powerful (and often updated) XLD.app to do this.
No hacks or workarounds.

Much better..
Click to expand...
 
S

spacepower7

macrumors 68000
May 6, 2004
1,509
1
ayres said:
I second this...

it's been a while since I last tried fluke... I like the idea, but let's face it - iTunes doesn't play nice with others. once I discovered xld to convert to apple lossless, I saw no reason to keep flac.
Click to expand...

I 3rd this. I tested XLD, convert FLAC to Apple Lossless, and back to FLAC, and used XLD's verify on each step. AccurateRip verified on every step.

I have many more devices that play Apple Lossless than FLAC, so it works for me, but maybe not for you?
 
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