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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.
Deron Dantzler wrote:
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.'
What do you mean by iTunes sidebar? Where is that? What view? I don't see where I can right click and get the option to "copy this link"?
I have been having problems with the missing art issue. I purchased TuneUp Companion to makre sure my collection is 'perfect'. Every song has album art, plus all the metadata. It took me a long time to get this right. I still have a lot of missing album art on my iPad that is configured with Match. So, while making sure that all tracks have album art does help, it is not the ultimate answer. I am still searching. It would be nice if Apple would just explain what the problem is and let us know either how to fix the problem or let us know when they think they will get it fixed.
If you right-click the thumbnail if the album at the top of the sidebar then you can choose copy link and follow procedure I provided. Also if you find an album in the iTunes Music Store you can right-click and copy a link from there.
I take great pains to make sure that the album art I have for my albums is at least 1000x1000 in size so that it doesn't look like crap on the ipad. I don't want iTunes Match substuting its 300x300 album art images for mine for any reason.
This is exactly the problem I'm seeing. A massive number of my tracks have been modified since I activated Match, and it seems to have been swapping out low-res versions of album covers I know I'd put in at at least 500px or more. Art isn't missing, but it is diminished in quality. This is painfully obvious on a retina iPhone display or Apple TV.
As a side note, I'm also seeing that it's changed the Album that a lot of tracks belong to. I had a couple of mixtape type CDs that friends made that I had grouped as albums, and iTunes has now overwritten that so they're scattered one-off tracks.
I have a Time Machine backup from last week, and I'm seriously considering nuking the whole thing and rolling back to my good artwork and track info.
Anybody have any suggestions before I do this?
Look at my post above. If you do it manually again it will keep the custom artwork you chose. You must have local copies of the upgraded 256 AAC versions for this to work. It is frustrating and takes time but it will work and you won't have to mess with it again.
Hmm. OK, thanks. I've spent SO much time getting and embedding the right artwork over the past few years, I'm still weighing whether this is worth it.
Here is another thing (and I apologize if I missed it in this thread). I have all of my artwork on my iMac, and almost all of it is on my phone also. But, almost none of it appears on the lock screen when I'm playing music on the phone. Reallly don't know how to fix that. Anyone else have this problem?
I really miss it, because when I'm playing all songs on random while driving, it's nice look down and see what's playing quickly if I don't recognize a track....the type is just too small for me.
cre618 wrote:
Here is another thing (and I apologize if I missed it in this thread). I have all of my artwork on my iMac, and almost all of it is on my phone also. But, almost none of it appears on the lock screen when I'm playing music on the phone. Reallly don't know how to fix that. Anyone else have this problem?
I really miss it, because when I'm playing all songs on random while driving, it's nice look down and see what's playing quickly if I don't recognize a track....the type is just too small for me.
The same thing happens to me, but usually it turns out to be a sequence thing...sometimes, but not always. It seems to happen if I've paused the music more than if it's still playing. I think it may be a bug in the new Music App.
If I'm using the Music App and hit the Sleep/wake switch to turn the screen off (music still playing) and I hit the Home button or Sleep/wake switch to turn it back on...the cover art is on the screen lock screen.
However, if I close the Music App screen by hitting the Home button to go back to my home screen (music still playing) and then hit the Sleep/wake switch to turn the screen off, the normal lock screen appears when I turn it back on.
So the key is to be sure the Music App/cover art is active and on the screen if/when you hit the Sleep/wake switch if you want the cover art to show in the lock screen after that.
Again, that doesn't always happen, but it does happen to me too. I don't know if that is what you're experiencing, but that's what it was for me.
Otherwise a reset will usually clear up most any odd behavior...
Reset: You can do this by pressing the Home button and the Sleep/wake switch on the top the case and holding them down together for at least 10 seconds, until you see the Apple logo. The iPhone should then reset itself. The boot up process can take a few minutes and then it should be responsive again. More here:
iPhone, iPad, iPod touch: Turning off and on (restarting) and resetting
Hope that helps!
octothorpe wrote:
Hmm. OK, thanks. I've spent SO much time getting and embedding the right artwork over the past few years, I'm still weighing whether this is worth it.
I'm in the same boat...I did NOT want to think about scouring the Internet for the obscure cover art I had found over the years.
Basically using the method I and others have described earlier, I was able to keep it all intact with iTunes Match.
Bottom line, as long as you have it in your iTunes library (and you have a backup, Time Machine or otherwise) it's not going to get lost. It's just been a pain to ensure that it gets uploaded to iTunes and displays properly on the iDevices (at least for me).
It's all there on my iPad, my Macbook Air and my iPhone now...but it was painful to get everythng working. The good news is that once it's working, it's good.
Thanks Rich...but I've tried all of those things, and they don't work. About 70% of the albums don't show artwork on my lock screen, no matter what app I'm in (or none) when I lock. Tried the restore too....
For what it's worth...
The method Rod410 describes in his video does work. However, it's a lot of work when you have thousands of albums that need art. All the music the iTunes app on my Mac found automatically is what's not showing up in the cloud. I think the iTunes app keeps the automatically downloaded artwork in User/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork whether your music resides in it or in some other volume like an external hard drive. It references the song from one location but the artwork from another. iTunes match is simply not seeing that artwork because in my case I'm pointing it to my external drive where the automatically downloaded artwork doesn't exist.
The more I contemplate the hours it would take to manually fix 1,500 albums missing artwork the more I think I should just wait for Apple to develop the solution. What's weird is you'd think that since the music files are matched from the iTunes store the artwork would come along.
The only thing I cant figure out is why match is replacing my dirty songs with the clean version.
It's because they released the software before it actually works right.
Okay for all those suffering with iTunes Match messing with YOUR artwork, not the ones in the cloud (don't have a fix for that, sorry.) This fix may or may not work for you, but I have 25k songs roughly and after enabling iTunes Match most of my artwork was getting changed. I would spend HOURS changing it back, going to www.albumartexchange.com (HI RES ARTWORK -- AWESOME!!) to do it and add it in itunes. However a few hours or a day goes by and its changed again. So here is my fix and hopefully this will help some of you out:
1 - DISABLE iTunes Match. First things first, do this.
2 - You will need to go to www.dougscripts.com and get the following 2 scripts:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=savealbumart
* What this does is save your, assuming, hi-res artwork back into the folder for your current tracks.
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=restorealbumart
* What this does is it EMBEDS your artwork into the actual file, something iTunes is not 100% to my knowledge.
3 - So after you have these what I did was I went to either the web/saved artwork from the file to a png/jpg file in that folder then re-encoded every album so the artwork was embedded and not a link to a file somewhere.
After that, and yes its time consuming, you can enable iTunes Match and your artwork should stay. I have had iTunes Match running for 5+ days now and NONE of my artwork has changed. I will also point out NONE of the artwork in the cloud has changed either...cloud is still showing low-res images but I am okay with that as long as my local library is good.
Any questions let me know.
And for folks with artwork problems, in the cloud, I provide the following tale of happiness:
I had a similar problem ever since turning on iTM. I finally called Apple about it. They weren't particularly helpful on the phone, but I've had a continuing dialog via email.
Their answer was basically to make a 'change' to the artwork on your 'master' machine by exporting it, deleting the art from the files, modifying the exported art with a rescale operation, then re-add the art to the affected files. Any time you make a change to the 'master' files, do an update iTM.
Their procedure didn't work for me, but the following DID work, and it's been stable for a couple of days now:
- For each album that was not showing cover art on the 'client', I deleted the album from the 'master', choosing to ALSO delete the album from iCloud, but KEEPING the files.
- Wait for the deletion to propagate to the 'client' machine.
- ADD the deleted files back to the 'master' machine. ("Add Folder to Library...")
- Wait for the iTM process to recognize the re-added album on the 'master'.
- Wait for the iTM process to propagate to the 'client' machine.
By the end of the process, I was using the above procedure on about 120 albums at a time, which made fairly quick work of the 700 albums I needed to do.
It feels like a combination of a bug (or bugs) in iTM, plus a capacity problem.
Hope this helps!
Brad
iTunes Match Lost Cover Art
