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”.