I was working with iTunes’s custom playlist feature today, with an eye to burning a CD and making a custom case sleeve. I inadvertently applied the wrong artwork to a track and when I created a mosaic for the sleeve, I realized the artwork for that track was wrong. So how to fix it?
I tried applying the correct artwork (dragging and dropping from Amazon is so useful), but that just adds an *additional* image: who knew you could have more than one?
So I figured I’d just drop down to the filesystem and remove either the images or any links to them: I assumed the image files were stored in disk and associated with a given track in the XML datastore. After searching around and then hitting Google, I learned that the art is actually inserted into the file. I guess there is some space for non-audio data in the file (comments, meta-data, whatehaveyou).
Sigh.
So I dropped the track from the playlist and my iTunes Library and re-imported it from the CD I had (fortunately) already burned. Sure enough, the re-imported track, having been burned as a WAV file and then reduced to an mp3, had no image file. Associating it with the rest of the album tracks got me what I needed, but what a convoluted journey.
Surely, there is some way to edit an mp3 file and remove or alter any extraneous stuff like that? In any event, perhaps this will be useful to someone else . . .