Fetch iTunes album artwork without iTunes running

Question

In a Cocoa application, I\'m looking for a solution to retrieve album artwork from iTunes without requiring iTunes itself to be launched and running in the background.

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Answer 1

The filenames are an amalgam of the library ID (D989408F65D05F99) and the track's ID (EB5B7A9086F4B4D4). The directory structure comes from the library ID and the last three digits of the track's ID converted to decimal, ie 4D4 becomes 04, 13, 04.

The .itc files seem to have a RIFF/chunked type structure. There is a bit on the structure of the files here.