Tao of Mac

Apr 30th 2003 · 1 min read

Perl Wisdom, iTunes madness

Spotted here, a Perl one-liner to extract album art from an file (using ID3v2):

perl -MMP3::Info -e '
$file = shift;
$x = get_mp3tag($file, 2, 2);
($i = $x->{PIC}) =~ s/^(....).//;
($e = $1) =~ s/\W//g;
$file =~ s/\.mp3/.$e/;
open $f, ">", $file;
print $f $i;
' song.mp3

Every single geek is going wild over the cover art feature, and some are using Clutter to automatically retrieve the cover art from Amazon (it stores it in /Library/Images/com.sprote.clutter/CDs).

Some others have found how to invoke specific URLs in the music store for searching, getting album data, etc, which may pave the way for Sherlock-like web services.