Building the Ultimate Apple TV Media Center - Part Two: “All Mixed Up” (Organizing iTunes)
At this point, you are either finished with, or well on your way to having all of your media ripped into Quicktime format, and assembled into a massive iTunes Library. You will start to get an idea of how large your Library will be, and should be planning accordingly regarding a means for storage (more on this in part 3).
Right now, we are going to focus on organization - getting all your music and video in the same library, and properly tagged.
If you’re a regular person, you might have some songs in iTunes that are tagged improperly. If it is a small number, it might not be so bad to go through and change the names manually. For those of us who have a large number of mislabeled music, I present to you iEatBrainz - a brillaint piece of software that cross-checks the musical footprint of each audio file with a large database of tags, correcting 9 out of 10 bad tags in your library. The few leftover that can not be fixed by iEatBrainz are easily edited manually.
Once all the bad tags are fixed, have iTunes fetch some artwork for you! In the latest version of iTunes, they allow (for FREE) access to their vast library of album art. Under the Advanced menu in iTunes you will see ‘Get Album Artwork’. As long as your tags match those in the iTunes Store, your artwork will be downloaded, creating less work standing inbetween you and an immaculate iTunes Library.
Your Movie artwork is a different story all together. Since Apple only officially supports the importing of CDs, that’s all the art they will provide. Enter Google image search. [cue: heroic fanfare]
Example: If I imported my .mp4 version of Little Miss Sunshine into iTunes, I would open a Google image search, and search for little miss sunshine dvd . I would then click an image that looked the most like the cover, and click links until I can see the full-size image.
You can drag this image straight from your browser into iTunes. First, you have to know where to drag it. So, let’s find Little Miss Sunshine in iTunes and highlight it. You can hit “command+i” or File > Get info, and in the window that comes up there is an artwork tab on the far right. Delete the current artwork (which is a random screen shot of the movie), and drag & drop the image from the web. Bang! You’re done. Your new artwork will now display in the beautiful cover flow view.
Those are the main points to address when readying your iTunes Library for tv. You want to get the most out of tv’s beautiful cover art displays by adding all the art work you can.
As your Library grows in size, it will also move. For instance, once it outgrows your laptop, you may want to move it to a nice 250GB external drive. To do this, just copy the folder “iTunes” which lives directly inside your “Music” folder. Copy that to your external drive. When you launch iTunes from any machine connected to that drive, hold down the option key before you launch. This will bring up a window asking you to locate the Library. You will point iTunes to your external drive’s “iTunes Library” file. You’re done! Now you’ve got an external library that can keep growing, until of course you outgrow the 250GB drive.
As this series continues, you will understand why the external hard drive is important - especially if you are aiming to have a seriously impressive iTunes Library.
Stay tuned for Part Three!
