"Mark Lively" wrote:

>>"Sven Radke" wrote:
>>> The Finder shows artist, year and album from mp3 files. So I hope
>>> there's a way to "steal" this information...

Sander Tekelenburg:

>> Finder probably calls QuickTime for that.

Hmm.  Maybe under the hood somewhere, but it's probably the new QuickLook at
the higher level.  (That is, QuickLook probably uses the QuickTime engine to
render previews. Just guessing.)

> And quicktime can be called through system events.
> 
> tell application "System Events" to {Name, full text} of every
> annotation of contents of QuickTime file ("" & (choose file))
> 
> {"Full Name", "Artist", "Composer", "Album", "Track", "Creation
> Date", "Comment"}
> {"Happy New Year", "Spike Jones & His City Slickers", "Eddie Brandt,
> Freddy Morgan", "Dr. Demento: Holidays in Dementia", "16/17", "1948",
> "album 1995"}

That's good stuff, but I think the OP wanted to get the cover art:

The OP, "Sven Radke", wrote:

>> I know the details about id3
>> tags and managed to decode them by a script. But my scripts have some
>> problems with embedded covers so I wanted to use what the Finder shows
>> in the get info dialog.

In that case -- and I haven't tried this -- you may want to explore the new
Leopard CLI command that manages QuickLook.

See:  man qlmanage

That will invoke the new QuickLook preview display, and so you may be able
to reroute and/or capture that output in some way (I'm not a shell person,
nor have I tried much with capturing any of the binary data...but I did
write a short QuickLook script for another purpose.)

Just a thought.
-- 
Gary