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How to add album art without changing a file's date?

How to add album art without changing a file's date?

Postby Cornflake » Mon Sep 07, 2009 2:27 am

Hi all,

I just recently got an iPhone and I'm copying my music library to it, and I have to use iTunes which is taking a bit of getting used to.

Anyway, I have album art for like 90% of my music in Windows Media Player, however in iTunes very few of my albums are showing art with them, meaning when it gets copied to my iPhone it won't have album art either. I think I realized why WMP shows so much more album art: If you have album art in a folder of an album, WMP automatically uses it even if each song doesn't have the art linked to it in the file. However, iTunes will generally only show the album art if each track is tagged... you can do this by finding album info in WMP and it tags each track.

But here's the problem I was hoping you guys could help me with: I'm very particular at keeping track of when I've downloaded something, and I sort my music folder by the date I downloaded each album. If I get the album info trough WMP it changes each file's modified date which means every one of my files will say Sept 06 2009 if I decided to download album art for all of my files tonight. Is there any possible way I can tag my mp3's with album info without changing the file's date?

- Thanks guys :yesnod:
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Re: How to add album art without changing a file's date?

Postby mnemonicj » Mon Sep 07, 2009 3:35 am

For an mp3 file, if the playback program is not getting the album art from the folder the music is in, then the program is getting the album art from the mp3 ID3 tag which is embedded in the mp3 file itself. If you modify the mp3 ID3 tag, you are modifying the mp3, therefore changing the date the mp3 was last modified.

Unless the playback program gets the album art from a location external to the mp3 file, like WMP can, you will either need to modify the mp3 file or not have the album art.
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Re: How to add album art without changing a file's date?

Postby jjewookk » Thu Nov 05, 2009 8:09 am

Try Tagscanner 5.0 or Mp3 Tag Tools v1. You can set it to preserve modified date in options. I've used Tagscanner to edit tags and add album art while keeping the modified date intact. You can find it at http://download.cnet.com/
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