Adding artwork has corrupted song

Sorry, but that does NOT work for me.

When it's corrupted, it's instantaneous, and can be verified by using Quick Look to preview the audio (selecting it in the Finder and pressing the Space Bar) without using iTunes to play each file.

Sometimes you can tell by looking at the files in the Finder if a file has been corrupted by iTunes when you add the artwork as follows:

(1) View the folder you are working on in LIST mode in a window beside iTunes so you can see it,

(2) Have "Show Icon Preview" checked in View Options (under View menu in Finder),

(3) Add artwork to the files in iTunes,

...you can see the icon of each file change as the artwork is added. As the files are processed the file will either stay with the generic "musical notes" icon of an MP3/AAC file, or it will take on the preview icon of the artwork you just added. If it retains the generic icon (or takes on the generic icon in the case of replacing existing artwork), it quite possibly has been corrupted and will no longer play.

It has nothing to do with whether you quit iTunes or not. Remember that it's not going to happen every time or on every file in a folder/album. So you may quit iTunes many times and think that's the solution when in fact you were just lucky the files survived.

While it may be a solution, it is not the solution; given that it is not 100%. Even if it was 99% (and it never is), that would make it at least 50 songs in my library alone that would turn unusable.

The failure seems to happen when albumart is added, no matter if I quit immediately or after 10 hours, the file has been altered (per chance currupted).

Unacceptable as the persisting problem is, I leave it up to external tools like xACT, XLD, Max, etc to do the job right. Managing textual tags (which works and I prefer doing that in iTunes) does not corrupt the file in as far as I can tell.

Perhaps it is time to see what the difference is, by comparing two files with a hex editor before and after (corrupt). But even then, without too much programming magic, one would have to look at iTunes' source, which is where I throw the ball at the development team... should not be that difficult or that time-consuming.

We should just give up, apparently Apple isn't going to fix it. They've just ignored the issue as if it isn't there, at least they haven't let us know they are working on it. This should have been fixed by now, as it is somewhat of a basic function. Here is the %100 way around this. You have to use a different program to add the artwork. Annoying, but required if you want no corruption. The free program to add artwork that I use is Kid3.

1. Ripping cd to iTunes. Find one piece of info that is the same for all the songs. For example, the year. Give the whole cd the incorrect year before ripping.

2. After ripping the cd, add artwork with Kid3.

3. In iTunes, find the cd. Since the artwork will not show up unless you view the info for each song, the fastest way is to select all songs in the cd, and then change one piece of info. So change the incorrect year with the correct year, and now the artwork will show for all of the songs in that cd in iTunes.

Another faster way if you have a bunch of ripped music you need artwork added to, is the select all the cds of the same genre, then change the genre in the info, to have added artwork for the entire genre to show up.

I do not quite understand how I've managed to avoid my songs being corrupted when I add artwork, despite the problem happening to me many months ago. Here is how I add artwork to songs:

1. Find artwork e.g. albumartexchange dot com

2. Instead of saving the artwork to your hard drive, copy the image to the clipboard (right-click, copy image)

3. Select all the songs you wish to add the artwork to, for example an album.

4. Right-click, get info on all of them

5. Click in the Artwork field (bottom right corner when editing more than one item)

6. Cmd+V to paste the artwork

This has yet to cause any of my songs becoming corrupted. Looking forward to any feedback.

Sadly, I just had my first instance of having tracks corrupted despite adding artwork one track at a time. I'd thought this was the workaround, but it's not. I just added artwork individually (using Get Info, then dragging and dropping a 600 dpi jpeg into each field and clicking "Next"), and nearly every other track was corrupted when I finished. First time that's happened.

I'm posting it here so there's a record, I haven't read anyone say that they'd had tracks corrupted despite adding them one at a time. Bummed.

(And in case anyone's interested, I did not attempt the same track with lower-res artwork, I'm using hi-res art so I don't have to go back and do this again in 5-10 years when everybody's using retina displays on their computers. I've never had an issue with hi-res artwork in the files, and many of the corrupted tracks I've had issues with were low-res artwork files, added several tracks at a time.)

This has been happening to me as well over the last few months. I have my library on a partition (on my internal drive) where I keep all my media. Very frustrating and ridiculous. Doesn't matter if it's a full album or single track when I add the artwork. This has been happening over many months and many iTunes updates. I have NOT upgraded to 11 yet, but I suppose I'll try that to see if it's any better. Ugh.

Apple?

I haven't upgraded to 11 either. Please let us know if it solves the problem. It's crazy that they haven't fixed this yet. Although from what I've seen of iTunes 11, I may keep using Media Rage to add/manage my artwork

When I add art work, I always make sure the music file is in the correct format. Sometimes iTunes will hang when you add the artwork. If you wait (Sometimes 5 mnutes) it will exceot the artwork and NOT corrupt the song.

I am irritated because the artwork doesn't show up on AppleTV.

I mean, I invite all my friends over so they can see and hear music on the screen from my AppleTV and all of the music files have blank instead of the picture for the music file.

And of course being fair, sometimes the artwork does show up but then other times it doesn't. And by show up I mean I have a home theater built into my house with 162 inch screen. It has the best sound system so I play my iTunes songs from there. I connect to iTunes through Apple TV. And I want to see the picture of the album flipping back and forth with the song that I downloaded from iTunes.

I mean, is that too much to ask?

They all say "go by the PC" which of course I will never do.

I'm having this issue with files that I have purchase from the iTunes store and have never manually added artwork to (I checked and the artwork is indeed 600px X 600px). So although it seems that manually adding art to multpile tracks may trigger the issue, i don't think it's the root problem. Plus, in my case, the tracks that don't play properly actually do show the album art preview when viewed as icons. Also, I've noticed that some of the tracks in my library which previously had the correct album art, now display the wrong album art. Of the songs I've found that don't play properly in iTunes, all of them play fine through the Finder (haven't yet tried them in Quicktime player or anything else) so I think it's the iTunes database and not the files themselves that is the problem. As proof of this, I just deleted one of the affected tracks from iTunes (choosing not to move the file to the trash) and then re-added the exact same file to my library. it now plays all the way through as expected.

2 x 2.66 GHz dual core Intel Xeon Mac Pro, Mac OS X 10.6.8, iTunes 10.7

Prior to iTunes 11, I have never had a problem adding album artwork directly to the song (mp3) via metadata using Media Monkey. With iTunes 11, copying (syncing) to my iPhone, album art either disappears or is not associated with the appropriate song(s).

Given that so many of us have created new iTunes libraries and tried moving corrupted tracks, stuffmittens, we can safely say its not anything other than iTunes corrupting tracks intermittently when adding artwork.

In your case, it might well be that you're suffering from a corrupted iTunes database. It's quite simple to delete the relevant files, reopen iTunes and reimport the media.

But I can assure you it won't bring back perfectly good tracks that iTunes has corrupted by adding artwork; an issue I've now had for several versions on multiple macs.

And, Derek, it's definitely not just iTunes 11. The thread alone shows that. But the problem still does exist in 11, only last night whilst adding artwork to files, 11 killed 2 of my 50 or so albums I was working on.

Usual case, zero runtime on some tracks, black artwork.

And this on my nice new MacBook, with freshly imported CDs.

So it has been for 2 years.

And whilst I'm in a chatty mood, I'd just like to address those saying the issue is specific or corrupt artwork - size, format etc.

I've tested widely, reimporting artwork once files have corrupted, trying different siZes, different sources (scanned, camera, iTunes library, Cddb), different music file formats, os'es etc.

none of this makes the fault repeatable, it simply affects around 1 to 2% of cases of importing artwork, of whatever size (and I use 600x600 as a rule), when you are importing artwork to an entire album.

10.2 seems to be approximately the last 'safe' version, from the posts here. No reports before that that I can see, though someone correct me if I've missed some.

10.2 came out 2011-03-02 but we have posts about this issue on this thread since 2010-06-22 so I think the issue pre-dates 10.2 (most likely 9.2 not 10.2).

iTunes 9.2 had a fix :

"Album artwork improvements make artwork appear more quickly when exploring your library."

which might have been the root cause of this bug.

I've been using iTunes 11 a little and have not encountered this issue with itunes 11 (I had it with iTunes 10.6 etc.).

But, and it's a big but, my library is now not on an external drive. I was wondering if it had been fixed in 11, clearly not 😟 so back to a third party utility for adding artwork I guess.

Sorry, ader, meant 9.2, not 10.2.

And no, whether the files are external or not doesn't matter.

I've had it occur on local, Nas over Ethernet and USB connected libraries in the past

I do this a tremendous amount, you see, importing art.

Same happened to me (itunes chopped off ends or/and repeats random parts of the song)

plus something nobody before mentioned... some tracks end with absolutely random parts of german radio stations. This happend with various tracks and the radio parts were written into the file.

This is horrible crappy situation! Apple has to do something against it or at least inform their customers.