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After hours and hours of uploading iTunes crashing repeatedly, removing problematic songs, etc. and matching the rest of my iTunes library iTunes Match finally finished.
Now all of the cover art for rare albums, etc. that I had scoured the Internet for over the years has been lost. 😟
Needless to say I am very dissapointed. I have a normal Time Machine backup , but I don't know of any way to recover those particular files. Any help would be appreciated. TIA.
Thyname wrote:
I don't want to sound dramatic, but I think I found the solution on the artwork missing on iOS device via iTunes Match. It worked for me in three different albums that was missing artwork, so it should work for all. It is a rather long process and manual, but better than nothing. Here are the steps:
1 - Go to your iTunes in your machine (I am using a 64-bit Windows 7). You should already have all your albums with the artwork on them.
2 - Check your iPhone, and pick an album that is missing the artwork from the iPhone.
3 - Go to your PC, select that album and Ctrl+i in your keboard. It will ask you "Are you sure you want to edit information for multiple items?". Hit "Yes".
4 - Multiple Item Information comes up. Stay on "info" tab. Copy/paste the artwork of that album (you can get it from any website, Amazon is a good one) into "Artwork" at bottom right. Click OK.
5 - Run Store/Update iTunes Match in your machine.
6 - Go back to your iPhone, turn off "itunes match" from Settings/Music.
7 - Power off iphone, power it back on.
8 - Turn iTunes Match back on on your iphone.
9 - The artwork for your album that was missing it, will show up in a few minutes, along with everything that was already there.
Good lukck! As I said, it worked for me on 3 separate albums. Have not tried it with multiple albums before the power off, itunes match off (on iphone). Let me know if it worked for you.
Just tried the fourth album by skipping the step 8 above (turning itunes match off/on on iphone). It worked! Simply powering it off/on.
That's cool that there is a way to fix it but it's not really practical for large libraries, mine is just under 25k tracks, imagine how much effort that would be to check everything and go thru this process. What's even worse is that I already did this over time: every one of my songs has the correct artwork, and it was already a lot of effort. No way will I repeat that whole process again all at once, especially since iTunes Match may just lose it all again. I think this is something Apple is going to have to fix on their end.
Eager to attempt your solution this evening. I think that it may be better than my solution (turning off iTunes match on the iTunes library and turning it back on).
Yes, please do. And don't forget to skip the step 8 (turning itunes match on iphone). I just tested it with 3 albums at a time (before powering the iphone off) and it worked as charm!
Thyname, it worked! Thanks! Artwork is now on my iOS devices. Less than perfect, but it's the perfect work around until a proper fix. I did try one other thing that I thought would make life even easier, but it was a fail. I figured that possibly I could "Clear Downloaded Artwork" then use the "Get Album Artwork" option to do the process automatically. For some reason, that did not work. I had to manually add the artwork to the tracks per your advice in order to make it function.
By the way, if iTunes matched your album, the iTunes Sidebar will display the album on the right. If you right click on the cover art there and choose copy this link, you can paste it into a browser. The URL will be like this: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/roll-away-your-stone/id355891434. You can then right click on the artwork displayed and choose "Open Image in New Tab." Your URL will look something like this: http://a3.mzstatic.com/us/r1000/079/Features/4d/43/d8/dj.qtdhtyqi.170x170-75.jpg. Remove the 170x170-75 part so that it's like this: http://a3.mzstatic.com/us/r1000/079/Features/4d/43/d8/dj.qtdhtyqi.jpg. Viola, iTunes artwork. Drag and drop that into the 'Get Info.'
Additionally, found that while the album is still "Waiting" to be matched, immediately after it's imported into your library, you can remove whatever artwork is present and add it using the same method provided by Thyname. It works. Then, the first time that it's matched it will function as expected and you'll see the artwork on your device.
Deron, I am glad that it worked for you. It consistently worked for me last night with several CDs I ripped. It is a lengthy manul process, but it only has to be done for those albums that are not automatically picked up by Match the first time (around 50% of time for me). It looks like it is a bug in iTunes Match picking up the "default" artwork after ripping process, which, if replaced according to my method will override it.
Thanks for the tip on itunes artwork! I gotta say, the streaming feature on my big screen tv and home theater system via AppleTv is simply awesome, especially with all my artwork present now!
When I first ran iTunes Match on Monday night, it completed the process and matched/uploaded 3534 songs.
I had about 4200 songs on my MacBook, so iTunes missed a significant amount of them. I chalked it up to network/server congestion on Apple's side, and re-initiated the process by clicking on Store / Update iTunes Match. A couple hundred new songs were picked up, but it still did not match all my songs. I had to run iTunes Match a few more times until it found all the songs.
The album artwork might have been lost during this transitional period? Now artwork is missing from some albums in the cloud, iPhone, Apple TV and another Mac can't see it. The original MaBook still has the artwork, deleting it from the song info and pasting new graphics fixes the issue, but I'd like a simpler solution.
Doneko wrote:
When I first ran iTunes Match on Monday night, it completed the process and matched/uploaded 3534 songs.
I had about 4200 songs on my MacBook, so iTunes missed a significant amount of them. I chalked it up to network/server congestion on Apple's side, and re-initiated the process by clicking on Store / Update iTunes Match. A couple hundred new songs were picked up, but it still did not match all my songs. I had to run iTunes Match a few more times until it found all the songs.
The album artwork might have been lost during this transitional period? Now artwork is missing from some albums in the cloud, iPhone, Apple TV and another Mac can't see it. The original MaBook still has the artwork, deleting it from the song info and pasting new graphics fixes the issue, but I'd like a simpler solution.
Hopefully Apple will fix this. This is a brand new product, and with millions of users getting it in a short period of time, it is hard to test it before release. For now, we have to be happy with my solutions. Here are the steps as a recap:
1 - Go to your iTunes in your machine (I am using a 64-bit Windows 7). You should already have all your albums with the artwork on them.
2 - Check your iPhone, and pick an album that is missing the artwork from the iPhone.
3 - Go to your PC, select that album and Ctrl+i in your keboard. It will ask you "Are you sure you want to edit information for multiple items?". Hit "Yes".
4 - Multiple Item Information comes up. Stay on "info" tab. Copy/paste the artwork of that album (you can get it from any website, Amazon is a good one) into "Artwork" at bottom right. Click OK.
5 - Run Store/Update iTunes Match in your machine.
6 - Power off iphone, power it back on.
7 - The artwork for your album that was missing it, will show up in a few minutes, along with everything that was already there.
I'm having to do the work around with the 25,000+ iTunes song library, so I started a new clean library just for my matched music and I've started in the A's. I too saw the album art issues, and have been using the tips here which work pretty well. Now I'm seeing something weird though, the iPhone is showing one of the A artists as "unkown artist", even though its tagged in iTunes correctly. Alphabetically the "unknown artist" is showing up in the right spot in the A's list, its supposed to be Amos Lee and its showing "unknown artist" right after America and right before Amy Winehouse. So its right where it should be, just showing "unknown artist" instead of Amos Lee.
There is something sketchy or wrong with whatever process and or files are used to update these lists. Bugs in it for sure. This happened previously with Anne Lennox, but I deleted her and her music from the iCloud. I haven't added her back yet.
Still the "unknown artist" and album art missing is just some simple bugs, I hope.
Update: Well now I have two artists that are "unknown artists", both Amos Lee and Annie Lennox. Not sure why this is...very odd.
ChrisMc73 wrote:
Update: Well now I have two artists that are "unknown artists", both Amos Lee and Annie Lennox. Not sure why this is...very odd.
I had the same thing happen...with different artists...but eventually they showed up correctly. Cover art and various other things began getting straightened out over the last few days as well. No idea why it wasn't correcct to start with, but it appears someone's working on it.
Right now I'm re-ripping some older tracks from 128 to 256kbps that weren't matched. Some are entire obscure albums (to be expected), while others are single tracks where it found and matched all but one or a few songs. I suspect if I waited a little longer most of the oddball tracks would be corrected, but patience isn't one of my strong suits. I just want to get this working and not have to worry about it anymore.
When I started this thread I was pretty upset but at least it's getting better. For us early adopters this has been a painful experience. I wouldn't have minded if they had waited a little longer and gotten it right out of the gate.
I figured out how to fix the "unknown" listing of my two artist. I just changed the name in artist view in iTunes, to like Annie Lennox 1 and Amos Lee 1, and then watch as it updated in Match and on the iPhone. Then I just changed the name back taking away the space and 1 and it updated again and had the right name.
A note for anyone that might be re-ripping uploaded songs for a better bit rate. Don't delete the original tracks in your iTunes library, click on "Replace". If you delete them from your iTunes library as well as iCloud it will also delete any custom cover art you might have had.
FWIW iTunes Match uploads the re-ripped content pretty quickly.
Yes, this is pretty much the only way to have 100% accuracy with anything you didn't buy from iTunes. I figured it out after a day of headaches by noticing that all of my music that iTunes doesn't sell was showing up perfectly with the art on my phone. For the stuff iTunes sells I downloaded the art from iTunes, copied the art from one of the songs and pasted it into the cover art box with the whole album selected.
The trick is to into your iTunes music folder and make sure that each file has the art as the icon, not the generic iTunes/QuickTime m4a icon. This does take a lot of time to do for a big library but it's definitely worth the effort.
Also if for single songs that you don't have the whole album, you need to select that song and another random song (must be from an album that has more than one song) and paste the art into both! Then you have to fix the song you used for help by selecting it with another one from its correct album to fix it. Single songs will not get the art as an icon for the file unless this is done since there is no way to bring up that small cover art box unless you are editing more than one file.
I hope this is clear enough. Hopefully some of you will find this useful. Remember, go into the folder on your hard drive where iTunes stores your music and make sure every song is showing its art as its icon.
iTunes Match Lost Cover Art
