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Is there a hidden preference for Front Row that will force it use the artwork for the mp3 it is actually playing, instead of the artwork for the album it belongs to?

Obviously I could retag my whole library to delete the album metadata for each single, but that's hardly an ideal solution.

Background: I have painstakingly added artwork to my iTunes library - not just per album, but per song. In other words, if I have a 40 song compilation, every single mp3 has a matching jacket for that song. So, after having done all this work, it irritates me that Front Row insists on plastering all 40 songs with the same "album" artwork... and since it designates the artwork for Track 1 as the "album artwork" it makes less sense still; the track 1 artwork will not even be for the same artist as the rest of the tracks on the album.

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  • AFAIK there's no way round this.
    – U62
    Commented Jul 24, 2009 at 12:17
  • What you're doing isn't common-denominator behavior of many/most Mac (or even PC?) users, so it's not something Apple is going to easily support, if at all. Front Row probably isn't the droids you're looking for to solve this problem, perhaps a 3rd party full-screen player will do what you want.
    – jtimberman
    Commented Jul 27, 2009 at 5:00
  • @jtimberman You are correct that Apple is unlikely to add this as a public feature - but a hidden preference seems plausible since the functionality might already exist (it is more involved to write code that finds the first track of the same album and get its artwork, than it is to just display artwork for the current song). Eg: if alpha versions of FrontRow worked this way, a hidden preference wouldn't waste any dvelopment time.
    – username
    Commented Jul 27, 2009 at 17:21

2 Answers 2

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I have found that to avoid being driven insane by iTunes, you have to completely give up trying to do things the way you want, and do them the way it wants.

Why do you have tracks that are from the same 'album' but have different album artwork? (I guess you are trying to keep singles grouped using the album name they come from, but preserving their singles artwork?)

iTunes won't let you have it both ways, you will either have to change all the Album names to show them as different releases, or give in and have one album with one piece of album artwork.

Actual compilation albums are easier to deal with. (Having different Artists under the same Album name). Just make sure that the 'Part of a compilation' checkbox is unchecked and iTunes shouldn't count them as belonging to the same album.

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Mhm, this sounds a little like your problem... Seems like sometimes there can be more than one album art per song...

Another possibility could be to remove the album information, so that the front row does not go to the album art, but uses the artwork for the song itself... but that's inconvenient for other reasons, right?

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  • It makes no difference if there are multiple images attached to a song - I rarely do this. Some people like to include alternate artwork or sleeve cover artwork this way, but behavior in Front Row will be the same - artwork for FooAlbum/Track1 will be used for FooAlbum/Track2, FooAlbum/Track3, etc. Removing album metadata is not very palatable - I'd rather have my music library tagged correctly, than work around Front Row's limitations.
    – username
    Commented Jul 23, 2009 at 13:08

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