Unable to add artwork to SOME songs

Question

Level 1

1 points

Unable to add artwork to SOME songs

I have a few songs from a very few albums where I am unable to add artwork. Other songs in the same album have artwork. Thousands of other songs have artwork. It is not permissions problem on the files - all files are mode 644.

In one album, all the files' info display shows "Format: MPEG-1, Layer3" and "ID3 Tag: v2.4" - because I converted my entire collection to version 2.4 to try and fix this. Stepping between info view of files that take artwork and those that don't I can see no differences. I get no error when I try to add artwork, but it never sticks.

In another album, some files are as above and some say "ID3 Tag: None". For the "None" songs, the artwork tab is greyed out. And yet they are MP3 files.

Any ideas? this is terribly frustrating!

Mac OS X (10.5.4), itunes 7.7.1 (11) on PPC

Posted on Sep 4, 2008 10:51 PM

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Answer 1

jrw429 Author

Level 1

1 points

Sep 5, 2008 12:32 AM in response to jrw429

After a slightly closer look, this problem is vastly more prevalent than I thought. Hundreds of songs across dozens of albums. Sometimes complete albums.

I never have trouble with any of the text attributes. Only artwork.

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Answer 2

Qyasogk

Level 1

10 points

Sep 10, 2008 9:56 PM in response to jrw429

Hey, I was googling for a solution to this exact same problem when I came across your post here. I did some experimenting and stumbled upon a solution. You might want to back up your files before doing this, just to be safe, but it worked perfectly for me:

1. Select the file, select the option to "Convert ID3 tags", you have to select the "none" option, which removes the ID3 info from the file.

Now you haven't lost any of your metadata, because its still in the iTunes library. But the moment you do this, you've gotten rid of the garbage that is preventing iTunes from being able to add the album artwork (which is ONLY in the ID3 tag and not in the iTunes library at all).

2. Select the file again, convert ID3 tags again, and now pick whatever you want (2.3 or 2.4, i have NO idea what the difference is).

Now you should have no problem adding album art to the file.

Good luck!

Jason

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Answer 3

Hembeck

Level 1

21 points

Sep 10, 2008 11:20 PM in response to jrw429

I lost a lot of album artwork when updating to iTunes 8 as well. Here's my solution for recovering album art: http://fdossantos.tumblr.com/post/49526153/itunes-transition

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Answer 4

jrw429 Author

Level 1

1 points

Sep 13, 2008 7:09 PM in response to Qyasogk

Thanks for the pointer, that approach works!

And what a huge pain in the ***. 25,000 songs to go through to see which ones are bonkers. And these are CDs that iTunes ripped for me (boxes and boxes of em...) so they ought to be correct.

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Answer 5

jrw429 Author

Level 1

1 points

Sep 13, 2008 7:11 PM in response to jrw429

Oh, and I drag the album art to the desk, then do ID3 none, then ID3 v2.4, then drag album art back. The ID3 none step loses the artwork, so you need a copy to restore.

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