Album artwork randomly showing as black...

I've tried restarting iTunes, and that hasn't fixed it. It's odd though - if I go to the artwork tab it looks blank, but the 'delete' button is active (as if there's artwork there). If I use it, then go to another track and back again, the window still looks blank but the delete button is pressable again.

I've also tried to add the artwork again, thinking I might be able to select between the two, but it won't appear.

Gah!

Found out a fix - if I delete the album but keep the files, and then add them to the library again, the artwork is okay.

That's a bit of a pain, though - and I still have no idea what's causing it...

Thought I'd fixed it, but I hadn't...

I think I'll try deleting the cache - I thought I'd sorted it, but I hadn't.

When I added the albums back into iTunes, the tracks with the 'blacked out' covers didn't go along with the rest of the albums - the information (metadata?) about each track had been wiped clean/ never stored.

Might it be worth importing the affected tracks again to see if it reoccurs?

I've imported a couple of new audio CDs today as well, and they seem to be behaving properly - it's just the BBC Radio Collection ones that are behaving strangely...

I tried deleting and re-importing the affected tracks from one of the albums, and they seem to be behaving themselves now. Hmm.

I've restarted iTunes, and they're still okay - I think I'll try restarting the machine and seeing if that's still the case. Fingers crossed (although, even if it is, it's going to make importing the other thirty-plus multi-CD albums a nervy and protracted business).

I've also had a quick scroll-through on Grid mode and Cover Flow and, apart from a couple of iT9-typical mystery multi-covers appearing out of nowhere everything else seems okay - is it worth trashing the cache anyway?

Cheers for the help!

turingtest2 wrote:
What format & size were the images you'd pasted in?

.jpg - roughly 60k, 400x400.

turingtest2 wrote:
...Only other thought might be multiple tags causing confusion. How did you generate the files? Some programs create both V1 & V2 tags but iTunes fares much better with a single V2.2 or V2.3 tag.

The files were from importing the CD with iTunes (AAC, iTunes Plus, Error Correction).

It happened again on the next one I tried (although the delete and re-import thing worked, even if one track had to be done twice), so I started to wonder if it was my new MacBook - this is the first serious importing session I've had on it (I'm gonna try a couple on my old eMac just for purposes of elimination).

I've now done three-in-a-row without incident, however - the difference being I imported the discs without changing the information first, and waited until they were in the Mac before messing with the titles.

I've no Earthly idea why that would make a difference, though. Curious and more curious...

Cheers again for all your kind help!

Yeah, I still have it happen occasionally and without warning. It's very annoying - almost as bad as that old 'last-five-seconds-of-last-track' bug.

Had this happen a fair bit yesterday (with BBC Radio Collection CDs again) - there was one in particular that even repeated reimporting wouldn't fix.

In a moment of try-anything-ness I switched the importing options to MP3 encoder (and turned off error correction) and, bingo, the blacked-out tracks imported fine.

Since done five or six other CDs with no issue. Could be just coincidence, but maybe worth a try?