iTunes Match Lost Cover Art

I just ran another experiment. First, I grouped all the albums that have the wrong cover art with 'Cover Art' in the grouping tag. Second, I cleared all the cover art by doing Cmd-I and selecting the blank Cover Art checkbox. Finally, I updated Match only to have the incorrect cover art come back. No amount of clearing this art seems to make it go away. I'm guessing that there is a cache somewhere that is not properly clearing.

For example, I have Elton John's Greatest Hits, Volume 2. After updating with no cover art, Match replaces the cover with Greatest Hits 1970-2002 which is not the correct cover.

i'm getting ready to give up on this. until apple posts some notes explaining what the user experience should be with large libraries, i just don't know what to do, and what actions will cause what effects. i think i jumped in a little prematurely. for instance, i turned off match on my phone, power cycled it, then turned match back on. the result is nothing. none of my icloud-based matched library shows back up on the iphone. i'm also noticing that match is causing a massive battery drain on my iphone4. as i said, we need some solid technical documentation on exactly how to refresh, recycle and reinitiatilize, along with good estimates of how long things should take for different representative library sizes. oh well.

Michael,

Try something to make the artwork appear in Finder: just change the name of a song file (in Finder) and refresh the view. If there's an artwork embedded in the file, it will show up. If you go back to the previous filename, it will disappear again. This is because the iTunes library has a record of your file name but is broken. If no artwork shows up, it's because the file doesn't have one. I always thought that downloading the artwork from iTunes would put it into the files but it doesn't, you have to add it yourself by Cmd+i on all the files and add the artwork. If you want to make a whole album appear you don't need to change the name of all songs, you can just change the name of the parent folder.

What happened with some cases here is that the Cmd+i AND changing some songs information will change the filenames (like for example the discs/tracks numbers) so it will make the artwork appear, but it's just luck.

Honestly, I've spent a couple of days finding this out, and now 100% of my artwork work in iTunes, Finder, and are correctly transferred via iTunes Match to my devices 🙂

gobigdave,

Becareful, if you edited the files while iTunes Match is running (the sync icon), files will not get updated correctly (because iTunes is gathering data, or sending data). Check again your Elton John album to be sure.

Godbout,

I made sure to not edit during any updates. No change in behavior.

For example, I have Elton John's Greatest Hits, Volume 2. After updating with no cover art, Match replaces the cover with Greatest Hits 1970-2002 which is not the correct cover.

I'm not familiar with those two Elton John compilations, but I do know there are a LOT of Elton John compilations, so it's worth asking if by any chance there are versions of the same songs on both. iTunes Match is notorious for Matching tracks from whatever it finds it the Apple library, so if it pulled the tracks from somewhere else, It may also pull the wrong album art.

For example, I have two albums, one by Art Tatum, another by Count Basie. Both are original Vinyl rips from compilations put out on the Verve label. Neither of these albums is available in the iTunes store, but several of the tracks matched anyway. I now have bits and pieces of several different albums. Personally, I'd rather be able to force upload an entire album, but that's just me.

gobigdave,

Sorry, I misread your post at the beginning. I thought you didn't have any artwork and that then on your devices you got a wrong one. If you had a wrong one already and you removed it, it might take some time to update, that's what I experienced. I got some issue also when I changed an album name, the name is changed but it is uncorreclty sorted (for example if I change 'Cross' to 'Justice', the new 'Justice' name will stay sorted in the 'C' category). What I've experienced is that it takes some time to change, but I was able to force it to change by doing 2 things: one is turning off/on iTunes Match on my iPhone, the other one was to reboot the iPhone.

Hope this helps!

JiminMissouri, The Elton John album was just an example. There are others where the album cover isn't even from the correct artist. It's way off.

Godbout, I do get most artwork to show up on my devices. However, there is always a couple dozen that are wrong. It's very strange because I can go to the master library and see the correct cover art, but when I select the album, the "Selected Item" window shows the wrong cover art. Not always.

My latest attempt was to drop the offending albums from my library and Match. Then I updated Match, followed by firing up all my other devices to ensure that the delete carried through. Once I saw that, I exited iTunes everywhere and added the albums back to my master library. BTW, this was after clearing all the cover art. When the Match update finished, some of the albums had art (not always correct either). I updated the album art and updated Match again. Now, at least I'm at the point where the devices do not have any cover art for these few dozen albums. We'll see if the cover art eventually shows up.

gobigdave,

Yeah, I got the same problem than you today. Some of my albums were showing up the wrong cover even if I set them correctly and they appeared correctly in Finder also before. The thing is that iTunes Match seemed to have synchronized the wrong cover back to some of my songs on my Mac (I don't really know why but it did, probably the last update I did on the cover didn't work). And you're having exactly the same problem, I swear! When you're saying you see the correct cover art in the master library but the "Select Item" window shows the wrong covert art it is because some of your files for that album have the wrong cover. Maybe iTunes is using the 1st item in the list so the cover will show up ok in iTunes for an album, but it is actually not and that's why it's not working on your devices. Just check in Finder, you'll see that not all the files get the right cover. So just remove them, add back the cover to all of them, make them appear correctly in Finder (this is the most important!!! this is what will make them appear correctly on your devices) and run Match again. Once I've removed the cover and put the new ones, they appeared in a couple of seconds on my iPhone. Just read carefully, apply and it will work I promise!

The real important thing here, always, is to have everything correct showing up in Finder.

edit: Just to make it clear, it's not that your devices 'stored' a wrong cover, it's always the master (on your Mac) that has a wrong one. Just check Finder.

godbout,

The really strange part is that finder would show the correct covert art. I would constantly repeat selecting all tracks, cmd-I, and select Artwork checkbox to clear out all the artwork. Then I would add it back. I will check the Finder now as well to be sure everything worked.

edit: It seems like Match is putting the old art back because the Finder is showing the right thing.

What a pain!

godbout, it's been 2 days since I verified the finder for the correct art, dropped tracks from iCloud, and added them back. At least now t looks like my devices are not showing the wrong artwork for the couple dozen albums. Unfortunately, those albums are now not showing ANY artwork.

Groan...

Have you isolated these issues to any specific group of songs?

Is there a common theme to the files?

My library is a JUST shy of 21,000 songs, music from all sources (CDs ripped with iTunes, as well as ripped from other media managers, audio captured from vinyl, converted from other file extensions, it's all over the place.)

Every single track has album artwork.

Every single cover shows in my computer.

After uploading to iTunes Match there is NO difference of album artwork showing on the MAC side.

There is small quirkiness with album covers showing on iOS devices, but this can be resolved by rotating my phone to landscape (Cover Flow) and back while the track is playing.

So why have I escaped this disaster when so many other people are plagued with artwork issues?

Several possible things come to mind:

I have never asked iTunes to find album artwork for me. ( I have my reasons for this, but I doubt anyone cares for a long winded explanation)

When I put a new album into iTunes I take an extra minute to highlight all the tracks, get info, and fill out the multiple track info editor, complete with copying and pasting a cover into the album artwork field. (usually 800x800 or better)

Would someone be willing to test this theory with a new album?

If it works I will explain to you WHY I think this works.

EE

Embedded Artwork is the key to seeing your album covers...

I don't know if this has been discussed in the 7 pages here, I didn't read through them all, but what I have discovered about the iTunes Matching and Cover Art that is important to be able to get all the art to show up on your devices from the cloud is that each song/file needs to be tagged with the art. So that when you look at the albums from the file system, and drill into where you see the songs, you see each MP3 or M4A in the finder, that each song files icon has the album art on it.

I tested this out, had an album that had been tagged with art in iTunes, but looked at the files and they weren't. Added that album to match and no art work was sent up. Then I tagged all the files that made up the album with art and updated Match and then it showed up. There are several ways to get all the files tagged with art, I found a script someone wrote online, and have been using it to tag them quicker, especially quick if you already have the art tagged in iTunes but its not showing up on the files themselves.

Here is the script I installed and use:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=embedart

Embedding the Art into each file is key, because if you think about what Match is, its doing it song by song, so the state of each file is important, and if the file doesn't have the art embedded, then you won't see it up in the cloud or on your devices using the cloud music.

You may have to play with turning off Match and then turning it back on with each of your devices to see the new changes.

Essentially what I've done is created a separate iTunes Library, where Im slowy adding essentail music from my huge 38,000+ library (master).

Each time I add one, I check that it has all the album artwork embedded in each file, thus slowly uploading and seeing each album with art on all my devices.

I can do an artist or two at a time and its getting to where I'll eventually have a nice 25,000 song library up in Match, ready for my devices to use as intended.

Hopefully Apple does know about these issues with large libraries and gets something working so its not such a PITA.

I used a combination of CoverScout and manually embedding covert art with cmd-I in iTunes to get all my artwork embedded into each file. Note, I found that dougscripts did not work reliably with iTunes 10.5. For all the albums that have the problem, I have done some combination of the following:

1. Verify art shows up in Finder.

2. Clear the artwork

3. Add it back

4. Update Match

Sometimes, I go as far as to delete the tracks from iCloud, wait until it propogates to all my devices, and then I add it back. Sometimes it fixes the problem. Sometimes it doesn't.

At this point, I'm down to 17 or so albums that show no artwork outside of the master even though the master has the correct artwork and everything is embedded. What is really strange is that it isn't consistent. That are a few albums where art shows up on one device but not on another. At least, I don't have completely incorrect artwork showing up anymore. Note, I stil have the issue where artwok on the iPhone doesn't always show up when a song is playing. I have to rotate the phone to cover view and then back again.

I wonder if my problems stem from some combination of:

1. I decided to clean up my cover art situation after I turned on Match. Too much of my cover art was grabbed from Amazon's smaller copy, and I wanted to used 600x600 or better for everything. Having build synchronization systems in the past (I'm a developer and CTO), I know it's not easy to get them right.

2. My Library (400+ Gig) is mostly ALAC and on a NAS.

and I wanted to used 600x600 or better for everything.

I've not been deeply involved in the missing album art discussion, but I did have a few problems and the reading I did in the threads suggested it was tied to dpi or file size or both. I resized things down to 300 x 300 and under 40k and art that was missing before - even tagged the way you described - started showing up. So you might want to take a look at the file size of the art you're still having trouble with. I say that because other members have suggested it's really the file size that's the issue.