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

iTunes 11+ (macOS 10.13+) introduced iTunes Library Framework that has this capability too you do not need to parse the iTunes Library.xml anymore or read the storage folders of the tracks

Answer 2

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.