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iTunes 7 Free Artwork: Not so much

▁ oct 10 2006

As of a week ago (October 3rd), Apple has started to “encrypt”:http://marv.kordix.com/archives/000927.html their artwork. The interface for getting the URL is the same, but instead of getting a yadda.600x600-100.jpg file, you get a yadda.enc.jpg file.

So the file is encrypted. Yay. I guess with the release of iTunes 7.0.1 they included some code to work with the new artwork. The decryption itself happens in iTunes, and it spits out a .ITC file (which you can extract the JPEG from, but that’s no fun, now is it.) Being relatively recent, this hasn’t hit the blogosphere yet. Noone has figured out how to decrypt this thing, although the blogpost earlier has some very superficial analysis of the files (MD5 sums and such). I want to figure out the decryption myself, but I have neither the time nor the knowledge of something like that :-/ Either way, if anyone finds out more about this, keep me posted!

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comments

Brett, 2 years, 1 month ago:

Ideally, Apple should really allow users who don’t have an iTunes Store account to download artwork anyway. Why the need to be logged in to download artwork?

Vincenze, 2 years, 1 month ago:

Thanks for the heads up, was playing round with it and thought something was up… only some covers were downloading. Apple as usual giving with one hand and taking with the other. cheers, v.

Brett, 2 years, 1 month ago:

http://marv.kordix.com/archives/000927.html This is also worth a look…

Jesper, 2 years, 1 month ago:

@Brett: Thanks, but I’ve already linked to that blogpost in my entry, albeit not very prominent. With regards to progress in decrypting this, I’m not very far.

Skeeve, 2 years, 1 month ago:

Ah! Okay! Now I see why the file is crap… :-(

Olivier, 2 years ago:

Is there a way to fool iTunes and tell it to download the cover, decrypt it and save it - all of this without an iTMS account?

Jesper, 1 year, 8 months ago:

@Olivier: Afraid not. My endeavor of decrypting this, has failed. I don’t think anyone else has made progress either. You need to have an iTunes account to download artwork, which IMHO, is stupid.

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