How to have a reasonable chance at getting correct album art in Mac OS Apple Music

TL;DR

Ignore the naysayers who claim it has nothing to do with the iTunes music store—they are wrong. Look up the album in iTunes and set the album title for your local files to the exact same title, with junk like “(Remaster)” and so on included. Then clear the artwork and download it again. Afterwards, you can rename the album back to what you want. If this doesn't work, then it will never work for that album, so stop wasting your time.

The Long Story

I still use Apple Music, the former iTunes, to manage an offline music library. I have never bought into the streaming game. It sucks for many reasons that I won't explain here. What also sucks, is how Apple Music handles album art, especially for music that has been ripped from CDs or obtained from somewhere else than the iTunes store. Very often, the album art is plain wrong. It will generally be from the correct artist, but older albums will often get the cover art of a very recent release, or a stupid compilation. I don't care about compilations, I want to know what album a song originally came from.

The cover art matching algorithm has always been bad, from the earlier days of iTunes to the latest Music app release in Mac OS Sonoma. The way in which it makes mistakes has changed over the years, but it has never made any sense. I would like to have a chat with the person who implemented it. I wonder how their mind works—if it works at all. Anyone with some vague sense of logic and a bit of programming experience can come up with a better algorithm than the current one.

And please don't tell me to add my own cover art by pasting it into the info window. Ever since it was first introduced in ID3 tags, I have hated this concept of copy-pasting the same JPEG or PNG file into the metadata tags of every single track of an album. What if I have an album with 50 tracks? Do I really need to duplicate the same image 50 times? That is conceptually idiotic. Album art should be stored once and then linked to the relevant tracks. It does not belong inside the music files themselves. This is one upside from how the artwork download system in iTunes/Music handles it, because it does exactly that: download a single file and then link it to each track. Now if only it would download the correct file…

Anyhow, I'll stop my rant and cut straight to the chase. How can one fix missing or incorrectly matched artwork even when you know the album is in the iTunes music store? After some experiments, I have found a way to fix some of the blatantly wrong album covers. For instance, practically all my Dire Straits albums got the same cover of some recent Mark Knopfler compilation with a red Stratocaster on a blue background. When using the “Show in iTunes Store” option on songs from those albums, it will indeed always send me to that compilation album in iTunes. However, the actual correct albums are also in the store. However, they will often be remasters, or “bonus track editions.” The title of the album in the store is for instance “Communiqué (Remastered),” while in my collection it is simply called “Communiqué” (because I care as much about what particular remaster a track came from as I care about compilations—I don't give a 💩.)

Therefore, despite many people claiming that the cover art matching has nothing to do with the iTunes store, I decided to clear the wrong artwork, rename the album to “Communiqué (Remastered),” and try to download the cover art again. And behold, it works. (Of course afterwards I restored the original album name.) The same worked for Neko Case - “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” which I had to rename to the silly “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Bonus Track Edition)” because that is the version which is available in the iTunes store.

The bad news is that this does not always work. For the Belgian band dEUS, it is totally hopeless. The matching algorithm gets stuck on linking all albums to Following Sea. I have no clue why. Again, I'd like to see the implementation of this “algorithm”—I really could use a good laugh. How can it be so bad? How can it break on stuff between brackets? Anyone who takes a quick glance at album naming should know that if something doesn't match exactly, but it does match when omitting stuff between brackets, it is likely a good match. And what about just giving the user the option to pick the correct match from multiple options if there is ambiguity? Oh no, that is totally un-Apple of course, because everything needs to be dumb and simple. Apple expects all their users to be dumb and simple.

It is rather obvious that Apple doesn't care about the ever shrinking niche of users who want to manage their own music library. This fares against their streaming income model. I even suspect this is why they subtly break functionality in the Music app, or refuse to fix bugs, like the failure to update the last played status in many cases, or the hiccups that make the whole Mac OS choke every 7 seconds when playing music on older Intel machines—see my older blog post about this.

Anyhow, if you are as masochistic as me and want to stick to the Music app to manage an offline music collection, now you have at least some chance to fix some of your broken artwork. However, it is likely I will not only ditch the Music app for something else, but the whole Apple ecosystem in the near future, because I have figured out that I have switched to open source alternatives for pretty much everything lately. Ironically, iTunes/Music was one of the few remaining things that I liked and kept me on the platform, but since they are now also enshittifying this, it leaves me with no real reason to stick with MacOS…

Enhancing headphones or earphones with Audio Hijack 3

Long ago there was an awesome audio enhancer for Mac OS X that could improve system-wide audio in various ways. It started out as ‘OSS 3D’ by Subband Technologies, later on it was bought by Joesoft and rebranded to ‘Hear,’ and it eventually migrated to the Prosoft brand name. This program offered various effects like 3D audio, a straightforward equalizer, a virtual subwoofer, and various other things that were both useful and gimmicky. Everything was fine until the program became unable to enhance audio coming from iTunes, arguably its most important target. Prosoft was never able to fix this and eventually the program stopped working altogether with the latest major OS X updates. Rest in peace, Hear.

I have been looking for a way to simulate at least part of Hear's functionality. I especially relied on it to obtain a more natural listening experience with headphones. If you have ever listened to e.g. Beatles songs on headphones, you will have noticed first-hand that headphones do not offer the same listening experience as loudspeakers. With loudspeakers, sound from the left speaker will not only reach your left ear but your right ear as well and vice versa, both directly and indirectly through reflections. With head- or earphones however, the left and right channels are fed strictly to the respective ear only. If the music was mixed with sound coming only from either left or right (as was often the case with the first stereo recordings like from the Beatles), this offers an unnatural experience. Even today a lot of music is mixed with loudspeakers in mind and will not sound ‘right’ when listening with headphones.

A good solution is to preprocess the music before sending it to the headphones, simulating it being played on loudspeakers. The most basic way to do this is to mix a bit of the right channel into the left and vice versa. This already makes Beatles songs less awkward to listen to but it's not quite it. To add more realism, the tiny delay caused by the longer audio path from the left loudspeaker to the right ear and vice versa must also be taken into account. From my DSP courses I remember that a realistic delay is 390µs (this can be derived from the geometry of a typical stereo setup and the shape of a human head). To further increase realism, there must be some low-pass filtering as well because higher frequencies will have a harder time reaching the opposite ear. And finally to get the sensation of listening in a real room, some reverb can be added.

This idea can be implemented with Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba Software. It is not for free but is well worth its price for anyone who needs to do more with audio than merely playing some music. So let's see how we can implement our fancy headphone enhancer with Audio Hijack.

The above image shows the setup. The upper part is the one that simulates a room. A slight reduction in volume is applied to compensate for the fact that we will be adding a cross-mix of the channels later on. A reverb effect makes the sound less ‘dry’ by simulating it bouncing off walls, floors and ceiling. The configuration of the reverb unit is a matter of personal taste. I started out with the defaults of the Matrix Reverb and reduced the ‘large’ parameters to have a faster drop-off.

The lower part is the most important one, it represents the cross-mix between loudspeakers and ears, the extra delay due to the longer audio path, and the attenuation of high frequencies. The 390µs delay cannot be obtained with the standard effects available in Audio Hijack, a custom plug-in is needed. I've found this free sound delay audio unit from Voxengo to be adequate. You need to reboot after installing the AU plugin to make it available in Audio Hijack. Enter a value of 0.39 msec in the effect configuration. People with really fat heads might try a larger value but it should never deviate much from this.

The exact value for the low-pass filter isn't crucial. This filter has two purposes: first, simulate the actual attenuation of higher frequencies that would occur in the situation depicted above, which is difficult to quantify anyway. Second, avoid interference between trebles in the original audio and the delayed copy. Without the low-pass filtering, there would be a comb filter effect that can make some trebles sound weird. If you still notice this, you may want to use a lower frequency than the 6 kHz I used here.

After mixing everything together, there is another volume control and an equalizer. These are optional but unless you have extremely high-end headphones, a little extra EQ can get that bit of extra fidelity out of them. The reason why you may need to precede the EQ with a volume reduction is that if you need a considerable bass boost, you'll need to attenuate the input to avoid sending the audio into overdrive. You may add other effects to your liking, e.g. a dynamic range compressor in case you're listening in a noisy environment (although a lot of modern music has no dynamic range to begin with…)

Another illustration why mandatory IP changes for DSL subscribers are a royal PITA

Originally this was a different article where I wrongly accused OpenDNS of blocking perfectly harmless websites, more specifically my favourite internet radio station, Radio Paradise. Eventually it proved to be a case of utter confusion caused by factors that only became apparent after some sleuthing.

Long story short, I was suddenly locked out from certain websites due to OpenDNS filters that some other customer of the same DSL service had previously set up. This customer may have been unaware that IP addresses on this service are forcibly changed every 36 hours, and did not take the necessary steps to keep their OpenDNS account up-to-date. When I received the same IP from the dynamic address pool, I also inherited the blocks. Eventually my only way out was either removing the OpenDNS servers from my config, or waiting 36 hours, or resetting the modem to get a new IP. This again makes me wonder why ISPs still enforce this idiotic IP change on customers. It is ineffective in preventing people from running servers because that can be mitigated mostly through a dynamic DNS. I guess this is simply another case of artificially degrading a product in order to be able to sell a ‘premium’ product with a static IP, at a higher price.


Here's the entire detective story for the interested.
On a certain day, I suddenly saw the following when I tried to visit the Radio Paradise site:

The OpenDNS servers 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 have been in my system settings for many years, and never had I seen this kind of block. Actually I had specifically switched to those servers to circumvent some idiotic blocks that were implemented in my ISP's DNS servers.

Radio Paradise being blocked made no sense at all. At first sight, there were only two plausible explanations:

1. Somehow I was now being defaulted to one of the OpenDNS flavours that filter potentially offensive content.
2. Some law prohibits listening to USA radio streams from within Belgium, and OpenDNS enforced this.

The second explanation was very implausible because I have never heard of any law like that, it certainly would have caused a ruckus on the Web. The first explanation seemed plausible because from a quick glance at the OpenDNS home security plans, it appeared that ‘Family Shield’ is the default when merely using the OpenDNS servers without configuring anything. Then I noticed this actually required configuring different servers, but nothing changed when I did: RP was still blocked. Hence I assumed that using OpenDNS without creating an account, had become equivalent to Family Shield.

This (incorrect) assumption implied two things: first, RP would somehow have been considered ‘adult’ content and second, many visitors would suddenly be locked out. They would need to go through the effort of creating an OpenDNS account to choose what is being blocked. For DSL subscribers whose IP is forcibly changed at regular intervals, this would be particularly annoying because they also need to install a daemon that keeps their IP address up-to-date with their OpenDNS account.

Even though the apparent ‘adult’ categorisation of RP still made no sense, this angered me enough to write an article where I accused OpenDNS of behaving like the great firewall of China. I also posted this on the Radio Paradise forum. No other OpenDNS users could reproduce this problem however, they did not see certain websites suddenly being blocked. In the meantime I also had created an OpenDNS account, which requires registering the network you're currently on. This proved impossible: the IP address was already registered! These two facts lead to the ‘eureka’ moment and the conclusion I started this article with. I immediately reset the modem to force it to obtain a new IP and indeed: everything worked as before.

This does illustrate that maybe OpenDNS could have done a better job at detecting that someone tried to register a static network with an address that belongs to a dynamic address pool, although I do realise this is not a trivial task. I now have added my home network to the OpenDNS account and installed an update client to keep the dynamic IP in sync, but I'm not sure if this will prevent this same scenario in the future. Well at least now I know how to fix it and how I can use OpenDNS to block the things I want, like spam domains or annoying ads that slip through Adblock, so this whole story does have a happy ending.

Approximating iTunes DJ in iTunes 11

iTunes 11 has generated both praise and revolt in the online community because it is a mix of both improvements and regressions. One of the most annoying things for me and many others is the omission of the iTunes DJ feature. Apple's idea was to replace it with the “Up Next” feature, but it is not the same. What I liked a lot about iTunes DJ is that it was a regular playlist that I could easily tweak and I could see all the desired information about upcoming songs at a glance. The Up Next feature requires a click on a button to temporarily view a severely limited list of what is coming next, and manipulating it is a hassle.
It is possible however to create a smart playlist that more or less behaves like the good old iTunes DJ.

The screenshot is pretty straightforward, it shows the most basic setup but you can tailor it to your needs with additional rules. The only essential things are the fixed limit “selected by random”, the “Live updating”, and the “Last played not in the last …”. All these things combined will automatically remove a played song and cause a new one to be added to the queue, just like in iTunes DJ. The time span for the “last played” rule is not essential, anything starting from 5 seconds should work. You can use a larger value if you want to avoid hearing the same song twice within a certain time span.

Next, make sure the playlist is sorted on the very first column (the one with the numbers and no header title), and disable shuffle. Then you can arrange the songs to your liking, and start playing. You will notice that whenever you remove songs, new ones will be added at the bottom just like in iTunes DJ. The only aspects in which this differs are:

• The biggest drawback is that it is impossible to add specific songs to the playlist. If you want to play one or more specific songs that were not randomly picked, your best option is to use “Up Next” after all.
• There is no practical way I know of to increase the chance that higher rated songs are played more often. Not a big deal for me since I never used this.
• One cannot see the played songs, you will need to use a separate “recently played” smart playlist for this.
• Of course the feature to let people vote for upcoming songs is still missing.