iTunes 8 has a new feature i’d been wanting for a while – grid view. Giving you the ability to view your music in a simple grid, much like iPhoto, grouped by album, artist, or genre. Normally you’ll see album artwork in this view; switching to genre view, however, shows some campy artwork for certain popular genres (pop, rock, hip-hop, etc) but is missing artwork for more specific / niche genres. A post on the iLounge forum details how to create custom genre artwork but it’s a little more verbose than need be and geared at the Windows audience. So here’s the briefer version for OS X.
- Close iTunes if it is running.
- Open your Applications folder (⌘⇧A).
- Control- / Right- Click on the iTunes icon.
- Select “Show Package Contents” – this will open a new Finder window.
- Open the “Contents” directory. Here you will find JPG images that begin with “genre-”, these are the files iTunes uses for its genre artwork. Those ending in ‘M’ are for movies.
- Copy one of these files to your Desktop by dragging it and holding Option (⌥).
- Edit this file to your liking and rename it to the genre of your choice, for example “genre-metal.jpg” for metal.
- Move it back into the Contents folder.
- Now open “genres.plist” in your favourite text editor (TextEdit will work).
- Copy one of the
<dict>entries and paste it into the list (making sure to do this between other entries, that is after a closing tag:</dict>).<dict> <key>matchString</key><string>rock</string> <key>resourceFile</key><string>genre-rock.jpg</string> </dict>
- Now edit the entry you just pasted to match the genre you are replacing. The
matchString(in this case “rock”) becomes the word or phrase you want itunes to search for1 and theresourceFile(in this case “genre-rock.jpg”) becomes the name of the image you just copied into the Contents directory. - Save the file and launch iTunes. You should see your new genre art in the grid view now.
1: The matchString appears to match around special characters. For instance the entry for R&B is “r b” but still matches the string “R&B” in iTunes. Also note that this string does not need to be a perfect match. A matchString of “metal” would also match the string “Epic Metal” or “Power Metal”.
A Flickr group is created, joining all custom “genre” artworks :
http://www.flickr.com/groups/itunesgenres/
Come and participate :)
You can also downloads this app for mac: iGenres
http://superdownloads.uol.com.br/download/3/igenres/
you can create your own genres and add pics to them, and then when you close the app, your new genres will be loaded into your itunes 8
enjoy
Thanks so much for this. Its exactly what I was looking for!
[...] Today I decided to make a custom genre icon for all of my Hebrew music. Here’s a good tutorial on how to do it: Custom iTunes 8 Genre Art. [...]
epic metal is so ridiculous why didnt they put just metal
because there is a branch of metal called epic metal
[...] ones and add new ones. A quick Google search brought me to an article on just how to do this from candescence.org. I won’t duplicate the instructions here, just pop on over there and take a look for [...]