I've written a new application. It's called Artie – The Strongest App… in the World!, or just Artie for short.

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Artie's main purpose is two-fold: download appropriate album art covers for songs in your iTunes database and to create playlists based on these album art covers.

Artie uses Amazon.com to search for album art covers. If it finds a wrong one, it'll find the right one. If it can't find anything, it'll move on.

Artie can also resize the album art already assigned to songs in your database. Some songs might have HUGE album covers, making the file size of your songs larger, taking up precious hard drive space and/or iPod space. Artie resizes the images to 160x160 pixels, making them still viewable in iTunes and on your iPod without distortion, while cutting down file sizes.

If you hate album art, Artie can also remove the album art from the selected tracks.

Artie can make playlists base don your album art. Artie can put all songs with no art into a playlist, which can help you in future updates to your library. One of Artie's unique features is the ability to make playlists based off of the color of the album cover. For instance, an album cover that is primarily black (Metallica's self-titled album) would go in a black playlist, while albums that are primarily blue (Foo Fighters – The Colour and the Shape ) would go in a blue playlist. While the color detection isn't always 100% accurate, it does create some very random playlists since it is not based on genres or ratings, or even years.

Artie can also set each songs individual equalizer settings based on the track's genre. For example, rock and metal songs would be set to the Rock EQ setting, whereas rap would be assigned the Hip-Hop EQ setting. This sets sounds in each song to certain levels so that you always hear the most out of your music, no matter the genre.

Artie can also add or remove track numbers from song titles. Occassionally, tracks in your library may have the track number in their title (07 Say It Ain't So, for example). Artie can detect and remove the track number. This will not affect songs like "99 Red Balloons," unless of course you have it's track number set as 99. If you happen to like having the track numbers dislayed in the song titles, Artie can help you out by adding them in.

Artie is currently at version 0.9, so it's definitely not finished. There's room for improvement, and I'd love to add plenty more features. Artie may have some bugs, but don't worry, the worst it could do right now is put a red album in the blue playlist or set the art for The Beatle's White Album to the art of Lewis Black's White Album. Of course, you can catch that before it saves changes. Anyhow, give Artie a whirl and report back with anything you find. I want to add tons more features, I just need to see what everyone would like to see.

Download Artie v0.9 (3.2MB) here.

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Wednesday, April 19, 2006 11:33pm
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14 Comments
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»  pimmel
Tuesday, February 20, 2007 4:08pm
GREAT! best programme EVER!!!

»  Mae
Thursday, April 20, 2006 5:47pm
HAHAHAHHA. Best. Title. Reference. EVER.

»  NOGG3R5`
Tuesday, April 25, 2006 10:22am
Artie Rocks! Great Job! Although there are a few random crashes everynow and again, so i have to skip a few tracks.

»  HemiLess
Tuesday, April 25, 2006 6:19pm
Great concept. Like the previous poster, I've experienced random crashes now and then also. All of these crashes occured while using the "resize existing Album Art" option. I've also experienced for lack of better phrase "data corruption". After using ARTIE and syncing my iPod, all songs are copied back to the iPod. Eventhough the application did not finish resizing my library. Once the data is corrupted and iPod is sync, none of the recently played information is copied from the iPod to iTunes. Example I played over 100 songs today. After using ARTIE and having a crash. When I synced no infomration was pushed from the iPod to iTunes. Only iTunes to iPod. I've played a few songs withouth using ARTIE on the library and was able to sync with no problems.

»  skipfourplei
Tuesday, April 25, 2006 8:47pm
I agree with Mae. Great title and reference!

»  Geoff
Tuesday, April 25, 2006 11:36pm
Hey, thanks for giving Artie a shot guys... I'm going to test it out soem more and try to experience these crashes to find out what's up and why that's causing iPod inteference. What version of Windows are you guys using?

»  Hure
Thursday, April 27, 2006 5:47am
WASd

»  scot
Saturday, April 29, 2006 6:41am
Great program would love it to update the genre, album title, song title info into itunes. in terms of dumping in album art works fantastic. also give a delay based on user input rather than the 3 seconds with the options of self editing info.

»  Xero
Monday, August 07, 2006 7:40am
Real Great App! Could you maybe add amazon.de because Artie doesn't find many german artist on amazon.com... another thing: I experienced that if a Band got two records with nearly the same Name Artie finds only one of them (for exemple Billy Talen + Billy Talent II)
Like the previous Poster: Updating genre,ALbum title etc. would be fantastic!

»  Luke
Tuesday, October 03, 2006 8:25am
I've got a problem with Artie! When i want to install it it says my system is not up to date and i should restart. After i have restarted the problem although excists! (P.S. I'm using Win 2k maybe that's the Problem?)

»  Geoff
Tuesday, October 03, 2006 3:41pm
Hey Luke --

I can't think of any dependencies that Artie uses that are XP-specific, but I could be wrong. I'll look around and see also if anyone else has any 2K issues.

I'd hate to tell you to leave 2K since there's a reason so many people and businesses still use it, but at some point, you'll probably have to make the jump.

Keep checking back for any progress I make.

»  alternative
Monday, April 16, 2007 12:07am
nice app! good job..

»  Wim Van Poelvoorde
Sunday, March 16, 2008 3:50am
How can I resize to 500x500 pixels?

»  john mish
Monday, March 22, 2010 2:39am
I've got a problem with Artie! When i want to install it it says my system is not up to date and i should restart. After i have restarted the problem although excists! (P.S. I'm using Win 2k maybe that's the Problem?)
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