Forcing iTunes to rescan tags in your library
August 15, 2017 in digital music by Dan Gravell
A common inquiry to the bliss support inbox is; once I've used bliss to embed all this canonically correct information and all this beautiful high resolution album art... how do I get my music player to show it?
Some music players will see the changes automatically, but some require a "poke". One such player, and by far the most common music player worldwide, is iTunes.
So what's the best way to force iTunes to refresh its files?
It just so happens I was recently listening to The Next Track's recent podcast about album artwork (listen to it if you're an iTunes user; lots of good tips there).
In the comments thread I contributed some experience of eight years (!) of fixing album artwork. One place I've always come up a bit short is, once artwork has been inserted into some iTunes files, how to tell iTunes to read it, and use it.
I've always used something called the Get Info dance. Right click the files, Get Info > OK. A bit tedious for a lot of files. Laterly, some bliss users introduced me to Needle Drop, which forces a rescan by playing the tracks. Needle Drop is a script hosted on the ever-useful and popular Doug's Scripts website.
Well, who should drop into the Next Track comments thread? None other than Doug himself, who suggested a simple AppleScript to perform the rescan:
Doug has posted his own example on his website.
Unfortunately, that's only useful for MacOS users, as AppleScript isn't supported on Windows. But still, this is a nice solution, is much less tedious than Get Info and should be faster than Needle Drop.
Thanks to Mink Mingle for the image above.
