My iPod doesn't show embedded cover art

I have the same problem, after spending tons of time organizing cover art and my albums w/ ID tags, only about 75% display on the iPod in cover flow. I've tried the resync by checking/unchecking 'display cover art' supposed fix but it just changed the black album covers to unknown covers (music notes icon). I've tried everything including re-importing some of the albums cover art again, it works for some and others it just turns the cover art black. I'm frustrated as I've spent a lot of time on this, while the art is displayed when you look within iTunes, but the iPod doesn't display. Everything seems correct except when the ipod trys to play those certain 30% of albums where the cover art doesn't come through. This as to be a bug or something because nothing is working. Everyime I try the fix, a different group of covers become undisplayable and formerly undisplayed covers will sometimes come into view. It's pretty random. I know that they're all there but the ipod doesn't show it. Hmmmmmmmmm?????? Help, anyone, please....

The usual method of fixing this is to try unchecking "display album artwork" in the music preferences section when your iPod is connected and click "apply". Then sync your iPod.

Then check "display album artwork" in the music preferences section when your iPod is connected and click "apply". Then sync your iPod again.

This should resync the album artwork to the iPod.

If this does not work, you might need to restore the iPod and reload the songs in order to correct this error.

See: How to restore the iPod to factory settings.

However, if there are songs on your iPod that are not in your iTunes library then you can't do this.

You've backed yourself into a corner by deleting songs from your hard drive without any other back up.

Sometimes the iPod data base becomes corrupted as appears to be the case here. I've never seen a plausible explanation as to why it does this, but the fix is easy enough if you have the songs stored in iTunes.

If I have the music on cd, why fill my laptops hard drive?

So you can easily fix problems like the one you are having. The iPod is simply not reliable enough to store the only copy of your music.

I'm not a computer freak with hundreds and hundreds of GB of available disc space.

So, because I have 750GB of storage space for important back ups I'm a "computer freak"?

If all you can do is to insult those who try to offer help, then I'm done responding to you.

I had this problem a lot with my 2G iPod Nano - I'd work hard to make sure that all my songs had artwork and lo-and-behold, they wouldn't show on the iPod - I even restored it several times.

I've found two possible fixes that seems to work, at least it did in my case.

First, make sure that every song in an album indeed has artwork - iTunes organizes per album, and I've found that at times, I don't always put artwork on all songs in an album.

Second, for some reason, my iPod would not show artwork downloaded by iTunes (via the "Get Album Artwork") I found on mine that it works best to go to the song, drag the artwork to your desktop, then go into "Get Info" and manually place the artwork from your desktop so that it's physically stored on the file, not just a reference as I guess it works. At least that worked for mine, hope it helps.

iTunes will display artwork if at least one track on the album has an embedded image however the iPod only seems to look at track one for art for Cover Flow & Albums menus. To find all the tracks without artwork so that you can update them you can try http://www.stum.de/itunes-find-tracks-without-artwork/ for Windows or http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts13.php for Macs. If you're using Google or other FWSE to locate suitable images they should be jpg's, square, 200x200 pixels or above and ideally borderless to give the best results in the various menus. As far as I know both of these tools will only search the local library so it's only really helpful if you're syncing your library, not if you've gone manual & deleted the tracks from the computer.

tt2

My fiancee got a laugh when I piped up, "Hey, Richard Pryor turned black!"

Just like a lot of you, I can see all my covers on my iPod thru iTunes, but some turn to a black square on the little screen.

I've come to the point where I keep a folder of cover art, just in case. When my iPod "eats" a cover, I try to add the same picture again. And when that fails (as it often does), I try re-sampling the photo to a higher resolution (like 600x600) and adding that. That trick has only worked a couple times, though. Unfortunately, most of the time a song loses its art, it won't take it again.

Both of us use the same PC for our iPods, so syncing is not an option. I would no more want to find her Toby Keith and Keith Urban on my machine than she would want to find my Nine Inch Nails or Rage Against The Machine on hers! Also, I had a heartbreaking HDD failure last year before I'd backed up a bunch of tracks. If I understand correctly, telling my iPod to sync with a library that doesn't have certain songs anymore means my iPod would delete stuff I've paid for. Not acceptable.

So far, the black covers are on just a few tracks, not that big of a deal. If worse comes to worst, I suppose I'll have to copy all my tracks from my iPod to a directory on my new HDD, transfer the ones I lost in the crash to the Library again (big pain, though, with the asinine four letter track names, to root out which is which), nuke the 'Pod, and hope for the best next time around. (Which means a BIGGER pain in the butt, going thru about four THOUSAND tracks one by one so I have just MY songs). Am I missing anything? :P