Why no artwork in iTunesLibrary Framework?

Question

Created Nov ’16

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How is it that ITLibrary only returns artwork for PURCHASED media from iTunes? There is no such restriction mentioned anywhere in the documentation.

My iTunes Library is fully populated, and I need access to the artwork I have carefully curated over the years for various media.

An ITLibMediaItem's hasArtworkAvailable flag is always false, and its artwork (ITLibArtwork) object never contains any imageData.

Worse, if I call ITLibrary's artwork(forMediaFile: ) method, it NEVER extracts or returns a valid ITLibArtwork object AS DOCUMENTED.

What's up with that, Apple?

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Answer 1

southernyankee OP

Mar ’22

Maybe this can help someone in the future as I am sure you've already worked this out after 5 years.

I use this to get album artwork that is embedded in the MP3 file (all my music in my library is MP3 music).

      let playerItem = AVPlayerItem(url: mp3URL)
      let mp3Details = playerItem.asset.metadata
      for item in mp3Details {
        guard let key = item.key?.description, let value = item.value else {
          continue
        }
        /*
         TPE1 = Album artist
         TPE2 = Artist
         USLT = Lyrics
         COMM = Comments
         TCON = Genre
         TRCK = Track of tracks
         TCOM = Composer
         TSSE = Encoder
         TPOS = Disk of Disks
         TDRC = Year released
         TALB = Album Name
         TBPM = Beats per minute
         */
        switch key {
        case "***2": mp3Info["title"] = value as? String ?? nil
        case "TPE1": mp3Info["artist"] = value as? String ?? nil
        case "APIC" where value is NSData : mp3Info["artwork"] = NSImage(data: (value as! NSData) as Data) ?? nil
        case "TALB": mp3Info["album"] = value as? String ?? nil
        case "USLT": mp3Info["lyrics"] = value as? String ?? nil
        case "TBPM": mp3Info["bpm"] = value as? Int ?? nil
        default: continue
        }
      }

Of course, this will probably not work on downloaded artwork, since that is an Apple product/service. But if you have MP3 files and you add artwork manually, like I do for my music, then this should work for retrieval.

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