Playlist Art on iPhone after IOS 13

As someone here wrote, buying an app - CS Music app - makes it clear!

Immediately!

You have than again the right covers in your playlist.

It cost 3 euros.

That was worth it for me, instead of losing hours and hours (at least 4 hours a day, during 6 days) with apple "support".

Enough is enough.

Everyone has to decide this for himself. CS Music app. I guess they will sell a lot ...

Apple, one more thing: I DO NOT move to Catalina, forget it!

Thank you SPRIDEL. This solution works perfectly and solves this ridiculous problem.

Costs very little to have peace of mind and enjoy your music with album covers. Easier to locate music.

Many thanks again.

I fixed this problem over a month ago by deleting all my music, uninstalling iTunes and recreating it all. And now it is all messed up again. It's really annoying to look for a Beatles playlist and miss it because it has cover art from a 1990's Opera album. At this point I would rather not have ANY artwork associated with music; artwork is a disabler not an enabler.

I just noticed that the art is different in the Library view vs the Playlist itself. Only the Library view is messed up. The playlist shows the correct album cover and the cover art changes from time to time in an unpredictable manner. ROFL, my Rock71 playlist has a Roy Rogers album cover art!!! Yahoo ROY and happy trails to you.

I have the same problem with my iPhone X and iOS 13 through 13.2.

TL;DR: it still isn't fixed for me after going through Apple support., i went with an alternative music app. I do have some workarounds but none that good.

I called up Apple and tried to explain to support my problem and I even made video recreating the issue and the support person on the other end could not seem to understand what my problem was. Eventually after giving a frame by frame explanation of what was happening, they went with the old faithful "get 'em off the phone" response of having me do a complete wipe and treat the phone as a new device and sync again. He said that if it still continued through that, then we could start the process of filing a bug request.

Throughout every step of explaining the bug reporting process he made sure to mention how much work it is and how it may take a long time to get an answer if ever, and everything possible to dissuade me from wanting to do it for my apparently small issue.

I finally had the time to do the complete wipe and factory restore and then sync my playlists all from scratch and the issue STILL EXISTS.

In the end, I picked up Cs Player off the App Store and moved the built in Music.app deep into my iOS app junk folder.

The only "solution" I was able to find, and it is hardly a solution, is that in iTunes (and I guess Music in Catalina but I haven't even thought about upgrading to that dumpster fire) if you go to each individual playlist that you sync and add album art to the playlist and not the song (click on the playlist and then add the art to the box on the top next to the playlist name) that will carry over between syncing.

Regarding your very good point about tons of wasted, irreplaceable time, while and I imagine current Apple staff hate hearing Steve Jobs stories, when the original Mac was in development and the boot-up time was too slow, Jobs said, "Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?" (from https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt)

This illustrates what happens when people take their eyes off the ball. On the other hand, I like to think that it is not a simple thing to fix or it would have been fixed by now.

I'm guessing that Apple are aware of the issue as it seems a lot of people have the issue and as the Apple Support person I spoke to said, it has been reported by multiple users.

Perhaps it isn't an easy fix and there's more to it. I work in IT and sometimes what seems like a simple issue on the surface can be quite complex to fix. I have my fingers crossed that Apple are aware it is happening to more and more users and are working on a fix for a future update. Until then, the only thing we can do is keep them aware that the issue is still happening and that may help push it up the priority ladder for bug fixes.

I might have found a work-around for this issue:

In iTunes ”get info” on one track in a playlist.

Copy the artwork from one song (for instance).

Click at the top of the playlist where it might show the artwork for the playlist.

Paste the artwork you copied.

Repeat for the 100 or more Playlists you have.

I had to do this even where a Playlist was only one album.

Sync your phone.

Hopefully you will see the artwork you copied for each list.

iTunes seems to create artwork showing bits of several album covers for say, a band. When they transfer to the iPhone, that artwork either doesn’t exist, so it reuses what it has, which is different from what iTunes had.

Hope this helps some.

My playlist art, once I moved to iOS13.1 and later to 13.2 were scrambled and incorrect. I finally solved this by adding the artwork that I wanted for the playlist in iTunes and then re-syncing the phone.

Step-by-step

1) In iTunes, choose Music to see all your playlists on the left side.

2) Select the playlist that has the wrong cover on your phone so that the playlist and songs appear in the right pane.

3) Double-click the album art on the top of that list (yes it works) and a popup window will allow you to select an image. Just select an image that you want. I used a 500x500 pixel jpg or png image that I copied from one of the songs in the playlist.

4) Do this for all the playlists that you have.

5) Sync your phone

This worked for me - after trying unsuccessfully to solve by

1) changing all the artwork on each song,

2) deleting all music and re-synching,

3) deleting the Album Art cache and rebuilding.

IDK if it’s coincidental and susceptible to reversing back, but I joined Apple Music, I hadn’t previously been a subscriber, since then all my playlists and album artwork in my library appear to be correct again??

Of course it not coincidental... just what they are counting on! People will get frustrated enough and give in .. NOPE. Also u do know you don't really own the music you are paying a subscription for. If you every drop out your music does too!

Coincidental is of course nothing like this. They want to force us to move to Catalina, to apple pay, apple music etc etc etc.

In earlier days they did this, too, but in convincingly building new OSs that you really like to move to. Catalina is just ridiculous and forcing us to move is unacceptable.

I will stay with mojave and will stay with iTunes. Just bought the CS programm and now all is ok. I am happy.

Without a move from apple.

Not my problem any more.

"They want to force us to move to Catalina, to apple pay, apple music etc..."

Sure seems that way. I love hearing in the current ads for Apple Pay that the service is "not from a bank - its from Apple". Maybe its just me, but I wouldn't get a "warm and fuzzy" about that based on how they've handled playlist art in iOS 13 so far... :)

"sometimes what seems like a simple issue on the surface can be quite complex to fix..."

True.

IMO, the issue could also be related to the fact that the iOS 13 Music app on the device might be optimized for Apple Music on Catalina - and not so much iTunes. And, since Apple has already stated they are moving away from iTunes, I am not optimistic there is too much importance being placed on what is effectively 'backwards compatibility' with their older platform. As a Windows PC user, I will have to continue to use iTunes for the foreseeable future anyway, so I wanted to fix this issue.

At this point, I have fully embraced the 3rd party app I am using, and actually prefer it to the native app since I don't feel like a Luddite for not streaming my music, or using the cloud... And while some people have found potential ways to resolve the issue, I have 100+ playlists, and it was definitely worth the $3 NOT to have to edit them all!

Like I said before - I'd love for Apple to fix this issue - not because I love the Music app so much, but because it would show commitment to fixing things that detract from the user experience of their products.

Thanks!

Hello, I use a Windows 10 1903 PC and an iPhone 8 iOS13.2. This may only apply to that config.

This is from a PC iTunes point of view.

I want to be clear, on my iPhone 8 iOS13.2, the cover art shown in the playlist view are all correct.

The playlist icons in the Library view are random cover images from the iTunes data base.

Apple or iTunes "knows" the correct icon in the playlist view and is choosing to display something else in the Library view.

Library - Playlists - the icon is incorrect

Library - Playlists - playlist_name the icon is correct

For the playlists that show correct cover art they are stable and never change; for the rest then even scrolling up and down is changing them. Any window update seems to trip a cover art update that is incorrect.

I have tried making an album with cover art then a playlist of the album with cover art and it never gets the correct cover are into the Library- Playlsit entries. Each file in the playlist has the same cover art data in the mp3 tag; I verified it.

I use fubar200 1.3.15 & Mp3tag v2.49 to check and modify the mp3 tags.

I did try all the suggestions by those before me and thank them for that but even after trying them more than three times each but never got my playlist cover art to work.

Maybe if we report what we see this may get some traction at Apple. Debugging is not easy.

Happy Trails