"Get Album Artwork" recently fails often to find artwork

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Level 1

19 points

"Get Album Artwork" recently fails often to find artwork

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this. I've noticed a distinct increase in failure to obtain album artwork, and I can't peg what it is. I recently updated to 9.2.1, but can't remember if it started with that update, or just slightly before. Maybe few months now that I've really noticed. But the odd thing is, many of the albums are actually found in the iTunes store, so that doesn't seem to make sense. What prompted this topic is, tonight, I came home with 3 new albums and it failed to find artwork for all 3...not 1 was found. So, I checked, and all 3 are in the iTunes store. 2 of them may be on smaller labels, but one was the new Arcade Fire album which is on a substantial label and has sold tons, so I have no idea how it would be unable to find that artwork. Has anyone else noticed an increase in iTunes failure to obtain artwork? I've been an iTunes user for years and this behavior seems very, very recent. Not sure what's happening. Any clues?

iMac 20 : PB12 867, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Aug 11, 2010 8:09 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 24, 2010 8:30 AM in response to Cory Smith1

I'm noticing the same behavior. Even though all ID3 tags in my songs are identical to those of in iTunes Store, iTunes fails to download artwork for recent popular albums. I eventually gave up and turned to Google for high-res artwork, but would certainly like to know why is this happening now when it used to work just fine. I tried signing out of the store and then signing back in, checked my ID3 like a hundred times, installed the latest version of iTunes. All effort to no avail. What gives?

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Answer 2

Cory Smith1 Author

Level 1

19 points

Sep 12, 2010 9:26 AM in response to Cory Smith1

Alright, this is a joke. No one else noticing this? I just bought two more albums, can't find artwork for either. Recently upgraded to iTunes 10, so I'm on the latest, but still experiencing constant failure to find artwork.

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Answer 3

Sep 12, 2010 12:40 PM in response to Cory Smith1

It's a problem for me every now and then, but iTunes is largely reliable for me for finding artwork. Yesterday I imported seven albums and five out of those seven received artwork.

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Answer 4

rellison

Level 1

0 points

Oct 4, 2010 12:15 PM in response to Cory Smith1

Since I upgraded to iTunes 10 I'm having artwork problems also. It seems like it can't find any artwork for CD's I import. For example, it can't find artwork for that very rare album "Abbey Road". 😉

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Answer 5

Oct 7, 2010 10:13 PM in response to rellison

I upgraded to iTunes 10 and lost 1/2 of my albums' artwork.

Not too happy. Every day I try to get the artwork hoping something was fixed...alas, nothing was.

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Answer 6

Oct 21, 2010 8:34 AM in response to hillbillyRockstar

For me it's always been the way that it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. For example, I imported 5 old Pink Floyd CDs today, and artwork was found for all of them but one (Atom Heart Mother).

Still, at least it's easy enough to find the missing artwork via Google, so I've stopped worrying about it 😉

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Answer 7

Oct 21, 2010 8:10 PM in response to Cory Smith1

I have the same problem with artwork...except I have the artwork ON the Computer...and when I import the album it doesn't import the artwork. Sometimes it doesn't put the Whole Album on One album, but, separates it into one song per album in itunes( reminds me now why I do not like itunes).
Anyway, so, if you have the artwork or get it on google...how do you download it to itunes???

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Answer 8

Oct 21, 2010 11:07 PM in response to ladynewipoduser

Well that's two separate problems really, but I can answer the artwork part, for a Mac at least.

Open the album, then choose "Get Info" on the first song. Select the "Artwork" tab, then drag the desired image and drop it into the big white area. You can also drag the slider to adjust the size that will be displayed in the albums covers view, but I've rarely found that to be necessary.

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Answer 9

james039

Level 1

0 points

Apr 12, 2011 4:42 PM in response to OldManLink

iTunes has been extremely buggy about retrieving artwork from the iTunes store for your MP3 files (clearly, they would prefer everyone buy the tracks directly from iTunes, but I digress...) The bottom line is that it most often happens with albums which have multiple editions (A clean and explicit version, or a regular/deluxe edition). Sometimes you can trick iTunes into giving you the art by renaming the album field on your track by adding (Deluxe Edition) to it, but this doesn't always work. I wish they'd fess up about this problem and fix it themselves, it's quite frustrating.

Ultimately, you can just search the album title on google images where you will almost certainly be able to obtain a high quality image of the cover art.

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Answer 10

MarkPek

Level 2

215 points

Apr 13, 2011 6:33 PM in response to james039

It's never worked for me. I've manually imported the artwork for probably 100 albums.

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Answer 11

May 6, 2011 9:49 AM in response to Cory Smith1

Got the same problem here. When I updated to Itunes 10, i lost about a third of my album artworks, and itunes does not want to download the artwork for none of them. However, it worked in the past. I clearly remember downloading the artwork for several of these. Does anyone have an automated solution or fix to this problem.

Apple can you help?

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Answer 12

vegan11

Level 1

0 points

Jul 29, 2011 4:50 AM in response to Cory Smith1

I am missing artwork for over 200 albums. I don't want to manually enter artwork for all 200 albums...

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Answer 13

Oct 31, 2011 3:40 AM in response to Cory Smith1

I am experiencing the same problem. I've bought three albums all released in the last month and the album art wont download for it. I attempted to get album art for other several year old albums in my library and it did get the correct art work. My guess is that something is broken or its a licensing problem.

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Answer 14

Oct 31, 2011 12:37 PM in response to Cory Smith1

I have a problem with artwork too. Back in July, I spent hours going through every song/album in my library and making sure it had artwork. A couple weeks ago I upgraded to iOS 10.5 and over half my artwork is gone.

And a lot of the ones I have are wrong. For instance Evanescence: The Open Door shows up with the artwork from some Evanescence tribute album. Out of the ~250 albums I have on my account, about 50 of them have the proper artwork now 😟

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Answer 15

Nov 1, 2011 8:54 AM in response to timLeNightingale

Yep, same issue. iTunes used to find most artwork, now cannot find it even for some popular albums. Proportion of successful artwork is way down. I guess Apple don't answer on these forums - what's the best way to ask them??

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