Artwork not syncing from Mac to Phone

This has only just stated for me but now just won't work... I have about 800 CD's ripped in Music and I've spent a *lot* of time getting artwork right etc...

I changed my playlist that I sync to my phone (approx 3000 songs) and noticed that loads of artwork had gone missing as it no longer displayed on CarPlay. (I rip to Apple Lossless and then sync to phone as via wireless CarPlay you get lossless audio in the car...)

I've tried all the suggestions of deleting all music from the phone, deleting the music app itself, restarting (frequently) and re-syncing from Mac to phone but it's still broken. I now have one of the many albums that won't sync artwork and again, regardless of what I do it doesn't sync the cover..

In Music on the Mac the artwork is there. If I look in finder all the tracks show the artwork in a little icon by the side of each track. Metadactics also confirms that the artwork is embedded in each track. All are Apple Lossless rips.

But when I sync just this one album to my phone, no artwork... I'm testing now with one album that fils as it takes approx 1hr to do 3000 songs which has become too tedious when just a single album shows the issue...

I'm stumped... Any suggestions?

iMac 27″, macOS 14.5

Posted on Jul 3, 2024 9:06 AM

Top-ranking reply

Ian Stickland Author

Level 1

9 points

Posted on Jul 12, 2024 2:56 AM

OK, so after a hopeless call with Apple Support who just wanted to blame the artwork tagging in individual files, it looks like the issue was with the Apple Music Library on the Mac. I'd spent a lot of time with Metadactics getting metadata correct as I use the music files with Sonos and a upnp server, so know the artwork is pretty much spot on.

I even DFU'd the phone to see if the issue was Music on the phone, but it wasn't. That just made things worse and Apple Music even started deleting the content of playlists!

It seems that the library itself must have become corrupted over the course of the many upgrades it's had over its lifespan so far.

So, as a last resort I created a brand new Apple Music library and added the existing folders into it... it took quite a while, but the result was a clean library that for now syncs perfectly with the phone again with all the right artwork too...

So Apple Support... if you care or are interested, I have a corrupt and working library file that you could analyse to see what's gone wrong in the various upgrades that must have happened over many Mac OS updates...

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Artwork not syncing from Mac to Phone

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