Refresh the iTunes artwork screensaver on a Mac

[Tambe257]

I've used the iTunes artwork screensaver on my Macs of years and I think it's great, except I've had the same couple of dozen album covers for a looooong time now. How can I have it fetch more? I assume it caches a certain amount of jpegs, but I don't see a way to refresh. Maybe there's a cache file somewhere, or a folder that I don't know about. Any ideas?

[kirkmc]

I used that a long time ago, but hadn't used it for years. It doesn't seem to work for me at all. I wonder if this is no longer supported.

[Tambe257]

I did a little experimenting with this. I think it caches jpg files from the artwork stored locally. I have a library of about 25,000 songs that's stored in an external HD and all in the iTunes Match portion of Apple Music (whatever the hell it's called). I also have thousands of songs that I've added to my library from Apple Music. I keep almost no music locally on my Mac, but when I occasionally get an album of mp3 files I will save it in my music folder and drag it to iTunes to add it to my library. Then I eventually offload it to my external HD. When I delete the files from my Mac the artwork still shows in the screensaver, and it seems to only show tracks that have somewhat recently been local. If I download tracks from Apple Music, (the encrypted files), that artwork shows as well.

 

Kirk - I know that you stream your collection on one of your machines. Maybe try downloading tracks on that machine and running the screensaver? Also, it will be interesting to see if this screensaver option is still available in High Sierra, since it seems to only work with local files, and Apple is obviously moving away from that.