Automating the search for missing iTunes album art using the OS X terminal

Since switching to OS X (and consequently iTunes) I’ve really become used to looking through my albums by artwork.  I have a bunch of albums that I didn’t get from iTunes which are missing artwork, either because they’re not in the iTunes Store or things are worded slightly differently in my meta tags.  I either buy albums on Amazon MP3 or I download free tracks from last.fm’s site.

I looked at a couple different apps for OS X that scan through the missing artwork and pull hits from Amazon or Google to use as replacements; but the free ones weren’t very automated and the paid ones were asking for about $50.

Maybe you’ve found a quicker way, but I always like a good excuse to do some shell scripting.  In a couple minutes of idle time, I figured out a quick way to automate the search for missing artwork using Terminal.

1. Create a new playlist in iTunes called something like “No Artwork” and drag all your aesthetically unappealing albums to it.
2. On that new playlist, highlight all the albums and copy to the clipboard.
3. Open a text editor (TextMate, vi, whatever) and paste into it.  This is a tab-delimited list of all the tracks for your albums in the format: “Song Name, Length, Artist, Album, Genre #”. Save the file as something like “no_art.txt” and close it.
4. Open Terminal.app and navigate to the directory with your new text file.  Run the following commands (on one line):
   

   cat no_art.txt  | awk -F”\t” ‘{print $3″ - “$4}’ | sort | uniq | sed -e “s/^/open \”http:\/\/images.google.com\/images?q=/” -e “s/$/\”;sleep 2/” | bash

Here’s a quick explanation:

• cat no_art.txt
  Print out the contents of the text file.
• awk -F”\t” ‘{print $3″ - “$4}’
  Split each line into tokens delimited by tabs.  Print out the artist, a dash, and the album name.
• sort
  Fairly self explanatory, make sure the output is sorted by artists first, albums second.
• uniq
  Only print unique lines.
• sed -e “s/^/open \”http:\/\/images.google.com\/images?q=/” -e “s/$/\”;sleep 2/”
  Replace the beginning of each line with an ‘open’ command (which will launch the application associated with URLs).  Append the query info to a Google Images search and enclose the artist and album string in quotes.  End each line with a 2 second sleep (which can be easily changed) to not spam Google or your machine with too many concurrent connections.
• bash
  Run the output through the BASH interpreter as if it was typed at the console.

I have my Firefox3 set up to open new URLs in tabs, so I get a nice browser with a batch of tabs and the best suggested artwork.  I usually look for something around 500×500.  Google is also helpful in pointing out if an artist or album name is mistyped.

With this process you still have to pick a decent match and drag the art into iTunes yourself, but I figured the steps above would be a good starting point for somebody out there who wanted to spend more than the 5 minutes I did.

Enjoy!

-Jeff