Add liner notes to iTunes albums

18 February 2013, 09:00

Many of us rip CDs to iTunes but this has the effect of separating the music from the liner notes (a.k.a. sleeve notes), some of which can be fascinating works of art as well as informative.

iTunes has this base covered, however. If you can photograph, scan or otherwise acquire the liner notes for the album, you can then import them into a playlist alongside the album tracks, and then view the liner notes whenever you listen to the music. Here’s how it’s done:

1. This trick only works with playlists and not albums within iTunes, so start by creating a playlist for the album in question — select the Playlists heading, click the plus button at the bottom left of the screen, select New Playlist, then give the playlist a name before dragging over the entire album to the new playlist area on the right of the iTunes window.

2. Photograph, scan or download the liner notes and — assuming they’re image files — open them in Preview. This can be done by multiple-selecting the images in a Finder window then dragging and dropping them onto the Preview icon in the Dock, or the Applications list of Finder.

3. Rotate any images if necessary, then — if there’s more than one image — Command+click all the images in the drawer on the left of the Preview window to select them. Then, no matter how many images there are, click File -> Print.

4. In the print dialog box, click the PDF button at the bottom left, then select Save as PDF. Save the PDF in a safe, permanent place, such as your Music folder.

5. Return to the iTunes window and select the playlist, then click and drag the PDF you created onto the iTunes window. This will add it to the playlist.

That’s all you need do. Whenever you play the playlist in future, just select the PDF file and double-click it to browse through the liner notes and see the album art.

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