Download album art from Apple with albumart-dl

I remember the old days before music streaming became ubiquitous. Back then, I used to put a lot of time and care into my music collection. I would put each of my CDs into my CD-ROM drive’s tray and, one after the other, create a collection of MP3 (later AAC) files. Then I would tag this group of files with a diverse set of metadata such as the year it was published or its musical genre. That way I could easily generate different lists of music. One of iTunes’ rarely used features that would use this information is Smart Playlists. They would allow me to automatically create collections such as “2012 Hits” or “Top Albums” so that I could easily listen to my favorites.

Finding a high-resolution image of an album’s cover art could sometimes take a substantial amount of time, especially if that piece of music sat at the fringes of musical genres.

🔍 Peeking at Apple’s iTunes Search API

Fast forward 10 years. Recently I was playing around with Apple’s iTunes Search API. By default, Apple’s JSON response object contains two album art related keys, artworkUrl60 and artworkUrl100. For example:

{
  "wrapperType": "collection",
  "collectionType": "Album",
  "artistId": 29836830,
  […]
  "artworkUrl60": "https://is5-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music/v4/e1/2c/5c/e12c5c93-b5d2-f4a0-50e7-f076ba1233f5/source/60x60bb.jpg",
  "artworkUrl100": "https://is5-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music/v4/e1/2c/5c/e12c5c93-b5d2-f4a0-50e7-f076ba1233f5/source/100x100bb.jpg",
  […]
}

Turns out we can download high-quality album art by simply modifying the height and width values in those image URLs, e.g. replacing 100x100bb.jpg with 5000x5000bb.jpg. Apple’s API is actually smart enough to automatically return the highest resolution image even if our specified resolution of 5000 x 5000 px does not exist. In fact, the highest resolution file I have downloaded was 3000 x 3000 px.

🖼️ Introducing albumart-dl

So I set myself the challenge to improve my Python skills and get some experience with packaging and distributing a Python application. The result is albumart-dl a free and open-source command-line tool that lets you download album art from Apple’s servers. Its name and function is inspired by youtube-dl and you-get, two tools I like and use regularly 🤟.

If you are on macOS you can install it via Homebrew. Perhaps it is useful to some of the lone wolves out there who still prefer to curate their digital music collection by hand. You can find out more about it on GitHub.

Hi, I'm Paul Galow, and I'm an engineer based in Leipzig specialising in AWS with a focus on Serverless. I'm also an IT manager and a Mac admin.