After searching the Internet and Apple’s support forums, I decided I would try my hand at figuring out how to add custom Genre Artwork into iTunes 9. Turns out, it’s not all that difficult to add custom artwork for Genre’s.

In my case, my iTunes Genre grid view looks pretty good, but as you can see in the following screen shot, there are some genres that don’t have any artwork. As you can see, I don’t have any artwork for Ambient, and I don’t have a generic Classic Rock genre artwork for Classic Rock. if iTunes can’t find artwork stored internally for the Genre, it will attempt to use album artwork instead. If there is no album artwork either, it will display a generic grey musical note. Not very attractive.

To begin with, close out iTunes and make a backup copy of iTunes! This is a very important step. If you mess something up, you don’t have to download iTunes again or attempt to restore the application from a backup.

Make sure that iTunes is not running before making any of the following changes.

Now, find the application on your hard drive. Most likely, it’s located in the /Applications folder. You are going to want to “open” the application folder. You see, applications in Mac OS X are really just folders named “application.app”. To open an application folder, right-click/Ctrl-click on the iTunes icon in the Finder, then select “Show Package Contents”. This will open a new Finder window with a single folder called “Contents”.

Now, open the “Contents” folder, then locate and open the “Resources” folder. You are now in the folder you need to be in in order to add the new artwork. You will see a bunch of JPG files already in this folder that are the genre artwork that Apple supplies with iTunes. Apple uses a naming format “genre-genrename.jpg”

You can find some pretty decent genre artwork at flickr.com in the group pool Genres. If you can’t find what you are looking for there, you could try searching everyone’s uploads for “itunes genre genrename“. Not every possible genre is represented at flickr.com, but its a good place to start.

Once you have the genre artwork you want, make sure to name the files like Apple does. It’s probably safe to name them whatever you want, but better to error on the safe side.

Copy all the artwork you want to add to iTunes into the opened “iTunes.app/Contents/Resources” folder. Make sure not to overwrite duplicates. No point in losing what Apply supplies. Just rename your version something close and then copy it over.

Now, locate the file genres.plist in the same folder. Open the file in a text editor like TextMate or TextWrangler, not TextEdit. You don’t want to put stray characters into the file and TestEdit is an RTF (Rich Text Format) editor. It can edit text files, but to be safe use a real text editor. TextWrangler is free from Bare Bones Software.

Locate an entry in the genres.plist file that looks something like this:

<dict>
	<key>matchString</key><string>blues</string>
	<key>resourceFile</key><string>genre-blues.jpg</string>
</dict>

Simply copy that block of XML and paste a copy of it just under it. You can not change the text “blues” to what ever genre name you are adding. Special symbols are treated as spaces: “R&B” is “r b”. Next, change the name of the JPG to the name of the JPG for the genre you are adding.

Save the genres.plist file and startup iTunes. You should see the new genre in the Genres Grid view. Do the last step above several times. Once for each new genre you are adding.

When finished your Genre Grid view will look more like this:

You may have some genre’s that you can’t find artwork for. If those genre’s only have a couple of songs/albums, it might be better to change the genre of the music to something else rather than use the album art or the gray music note art. If you don’t mind that, then more power to you, but if you are like me, I prefer to use nice genre artwork, so I just changed the genres. I didn’t have that many tracks that didn’t “fit” or have artwork for their genres. So changing them wasn’t an issue for me.

Update 9/22/09: For Windows users the process is almost identical. The location of the Genre artwork image files is: {drive}:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.Resources (unless you installed iTunes someplace else. Just look in the iTunes folder for a folder called iTunes.Resources)

Place all your Genre artwork in the iTunes.Resources folder. Once you have all your artwork copied, edit the ‘genres.plist’ file in the same folder using a true text editor. NOT ‘NotePad or WordPad’. There is a great freeware text editor out there called NotePad++ located at: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/.

Once those steps are completed, you should be able to startup iTunes for Windows with your new Genre Artwork too.

Either way, hope you found this How-To useful.