Cant Download Artwork - Newbie problems?

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Level 1

8 points

Cant Download Artwork - Newbie problems?

Hi All,

Just getting to grips with my Christmas present. It is a Classic 160 and I have a library of tunes I use with Windows Media Center. I have installed the latest I-Tunes software and it has loaded all my songs. I have quite a few album covers missing so I tried to download the artwork using the facility within I-Tunes. Each time I try this I get the error message:

"Artwork could not be found. An unknown error occurred (-609)"

Now these are mainstream albums, not some obscure '70s prog rock band. I get this error on everything.

I tried creating a rule in Bitdefender to allow I-Tunes complete access to the internet thinking that firewall may be the issue but that did not fix it. Since then I have been trawling the internet in search of the answer but have found nothing about this fault code. Could any of you more experienced users point me it the direction of a fix?

Thanks.

Dell Inspiron, Windows 7

Posted on Dec 25, 2009 1:25 PM

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Answer 1

planb77

Level 7

32,434 points

Dec 25, 2009 1:40 PM in response to boggie123

Hello there,
And welcome to Apple Discussions!

First I would try this:
Sign out of iTunes store
Quit iTunes
Re-load iTunes
Log into Store
And then re-attempt to retrieve album artwork

Or try the solution provided in this article.
http://en.onsoftware.com/fix-itunes-artwork-error-609-with-fixtunes/

Or this older thread.
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6282593#6282593

B-rock

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Answer 2

boggie123 Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 29, 2009 5:16 PM in response to planb77

Cheers! That sorted it - much appreciated.

I uninstalled iTunes, removed the data folder, created by iTunes in 'My Music', then reinstalled the software. Gone is the -606 error and I now have a lot more cover artwork. iTunes loaded them up, where it could, whilst importing the ‘My Music’ folder. It is surprising how successful it was but also surprising in that there are number of mainstream albums it could not find. I guess in some cases it could be down to a simple metadata mismatch such as capital letters or album title variations (EG XXXXXX(Bonus Tracks) instead of just XXXXXX on the iTunes database). However, most of the album folders contain cover artwork included when I imported my CDs using WMP over the last few years; I assume these were included on the CD. Why can’t iTunes import them automatically? In those cases I can manually import the image into iTunes but it is a pain for me as the problem affects quite a few albums. I also have a handful of albums that I recently had recovered from a head-crashed hard drive. Understandably there had been some data corruption but strangely, as far as I can tell, it seems only (some) images have been affected (bits missing, horizontal lines etc). I have not listened to all the tracks all the way through but I checked the first minute or so of each one and they sounded OK (only time will tell if I am being a optimistic).

It seems I am faced with either going up into my loft to dig out the CD's in question (they are at least 5 boxes, somewhere up there) so I can re import them using iTunes OR search for the missing /damaged images on the web, saving them into their respective album folders and manually importing each one into iTunes? Is there an easier way?

Many thanks,
Ian

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