iTunes: Change The Text String That Prints On CD Jewel Case Inserts
March 17th, 2005

Anyone who has ever printed a CD jewel case insert from iTunes has seen the little string of text (Printed with iTunes) that prints at the bottom of the song list. I imagine that a lot of users would like to change that string to something more personal. Here's the skinny on how to make that idea a reality!

This mod was made possible through the generous assistance and insight of our helpful friends; Randy Meadows, ben, Daniel Øhrgaard, Peter Sobot, and "the pickle".

String modification is an area that I have little personal knowledge of. Randy gave me a quick overview of Pascal strings that was very instrumental in helping me understand the process of changing string length, we'll share his notes within our article.

First things first — make a copy of your current install of iTunes. I copied the entire app, version 4.7.1, to my desktop and renamed it iTunes Pig.

Required software; HexEdit, ResFork or other similar applications.

Control Click or Right Click on iTunes, select Show Package Contents from the contextual menu. Open the Contents folder, then Resources, then English.lproj (or your installed default language). Locate Localized.rsrc and make a copy just in case you need to try this mod more than once.




If your replacement text contains the same number of characters as Printed with iTunes (nineteen to be exact) you can use HexEdit to locate and replace the string.

Open Localized.rsrc in HexEdit and locate scroll down to line 00057700, highlight Printed with iTunes and insert your nineteen character replacement text (don't forget, spaces must be counted as part of the total).

Quit out of HexEdit, launch iTunes and print a CD jewel case insert to show off your cool new text string!




See the decimal "." directly in front of the P in Print? That's the hex equivalent of nineteen in a Pascal string, here's how Randy Meadows explains it...

That's a great definition — more info for working with Pascal strings can be Googled up at your covenience!

iTunes crashed repeatedly when I entered my new twenty-one characater string, Random Chance Records, even after changing the length byte to hexadecimal 15 with HexEdit.




On his ArcticMac page that covers this same mod, ben recommends "...NOT using a basic HEX editor..." to change the length byte.

A quick search of MacUpdate located a list of various apps for managing resource forks; after downloading a few of them I found ResFork was exactly what I needed to be successful with changing the length byte.

Opening Localized.rsrc in ResFork has a bit a familiar look for old ResEdit users. Double-click to open iST# and scroll all the way down to locate resource number 9100.

Note: if Localized.rsrc does not appear like the intital window shown above close the file and open it in HexEdit. Then select Edit Other Fork from the File menu, answer Yes in the dialog box that asks Do you wish to create this fork? Close out of HexEdit and open again in ResFork.

Now open resource 9100, make your changes and quit out of ResFork.

Looky, looky — ResFork did the trick!