[Tutorial] Custom Genre Artwork in iTunes 8

Subscriber From : UK OS : Windows 7

Not sure if this will benefit anyone but I thought I would let people know what I found out earlier today.

At first on iTunes 8 I realised that some my genre artwork was displaying wrongly, for example 'Rap' had the artwork of 'Hip Hop'. With a bit of tweaking you can change the genre artwork for any of your genres, I'll talk about how to do this below.

This is my first tutorial so I hope I've explained it enough so that it is easy to follow.
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Things needed: iTunes 8 & The image you want to use for your genre artwork

BE SURE TO BACK-UP YOUR genres.plist FILE JUST IN CASE, ALSO BACK IT UP ONCE YOU'VE FINISHED ADDING NEW ARTWORKS AS A NEW iTUNES INSTALL MAY OVERWRITE THE CHANGES

Step 1. Windows Navigate to 'C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.Resources'
OS X /Applications/iTunes.app/Resources (To enter iTunes.app, right click or command click and hit "Show Package Contents..." or something similar) <- Props to alxmarcond

Step 2. Open up the 'genres.plist' in notepad

Step 3. Find a genre that you do not use within the text

Step 4. Replace the text to match your desired genre as shown in the example below, changing blues to rap

Code:: [b]Before[/b]

<key>matchString</key><string>blues</string>
<key>resourceFile</key><string>genre-blues.jpg</string>

[b]After[/b]

<key>matchString</key><string>Rap</string>
<key>resourceFile</key><string>genre-rap.jpg</string>

Step 5. Now rename the image you are going to use to genre-genrehere
In this case it would be genre-rap

Make sure you save the image as a JPG

Step 6. Place the image you are going to use in the same folder as the genres.plist file: (C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.Resources)

Step 7. Now repeat the above steps for your desired genres

Step 8. Enjoy your new artworks. You can see an example of this below, click the thumbnail for a larger view.

[Tutorial] Custom Genre Artwork in iTunes 8 Customzb9.th

[Tutorial] Custom Genre Artwork in iTunes 8 Customzb9.th

of course Rap is a form of hip hop but nice hacking wink

Subscriber From : UK OS : Windows 7

I know but I class some of my songs as rap, and some others as hip hip so that's why I did it :p

Thanks for the comment happy

ahhh, i see. ill have to look into these plist thingies. got into a bunch with the iphone but now thats sorta boring... maybe some iTunes hacking is in my future B)