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yg17

macrumors Pentium
Original poster
Aug 1, 2004
15,030
3,009
St. Louis, MO
I've got almost all of my music tagged with album art and a library of ~5800 songs, so obviously, thats a ton of space taken up by the art alone. My iPod is non-color, so album art is absolutley useless on my iPod. Is there a way to make iTunes strip out the album art before transferring it to my iPod so I have more space on it for music? Thanks.
 
You can't delete them when transferring to the iPod. The images are stored in the ID3 tag info (I think that was the name) as such its deep in the data, connected together with the music to say.
 
yg17 said:
I've got almost all of my music tagged with album art and a library of ~5800 songs, so obviously, thats a ton of space taken up by the art alone. My iPod is non-color, so album art is absolutley useless on my iPod. Is there a way to make iTunes strip out the album art before transferring it to my iPod so I have more space on it for music? Thanks.

If you keep the art you embed in the files low res, no more than 500x500, i.e. < 100 dpi and you can get the image down to 30kB or less. For a typical 3MB file you're adding only 1% to your library size. Reduce the resolution by a factor of 2 and the total impact of Album Art should be less than 0.25% of your total library size. Amazon is a good source for images in this resoultion and file size range.

I'm considering scanning the booklets to add higher res PDF versions of the files to the library similar to the booklets availble in iTunes. I aready staterd adding some of the music videos available on "enhanced CDs". These would not get synced to the iPod.

B
 
I've never tried this on my own pod cauz i use the Album Art, and i can't guarantee that it won't blow things up, but here's an idea:

If your iPod is set to mount in disk mode, try this...

after updating the pod,
1) open the Terminal application.
2) type this command, but replace <podname> with the name of your iPod:
cd /Volumes/<podname>/iPod_Control/Artwork
3) type "ls" and you will see a few files with a .ithmb extension.
4) type "rm *.ithmb" to remove these thumbnail files.
****be super-careful with the rm command! it could hose your hard disk!

I think that's where the artwork is stored. I have two .ithmb files, and they take up about 100MB.

Again, i've never tried this and have no idea if this will cause problems on the iPod, but it could be a quick&dirty hack to free up some space.

Godspeed!
D.Be
 
Mike Teezie said:
For some reason, my Nano refuses to show artwork.

What could I be doing wrong?

I was having artwork problems with my Nano too. I just unchecked 'show album art' in the ipod prefs, let itunes remove all the art from the ipod, then rechecked 'show album art' to add all the art again and it all worked for some reason.
 
select all in itunes and checkmark the box for the album art.. it'll delete all of it
 
Album art...

I have been having probs with album art on my Nano - for some reason it was displaying the wrong album cover for certain songs. In each case it was displaying the same album cover (Californication bt the Chillis, in case you're interested!?) instead of the correct cover.
But I have unchecked the "display album artwork..." option in the ipod settings on iTunes, did an update, then re-checked this option and after another update its all fine now.
Just thought I would mention this in case anyone else has the same problem! Cheers.
 
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