iTunes Match artwork reverting to old version

I have never used 'automatically download album art' and it is definitely switched off. Also my problem is not (yet) the connection with other devices, as I'm currently only using iMatch on my primary Mac. The problem remains that it is impossible to change the art work from the initial match or upload. Often the push of the initial art work is quite aggressive: within seconds of having deleted it from the Track Info, it reappears. In Finder I can actually see the change in the individual track file. The only way in which I can make changes stick is by deleting the track from the library and from the cloud & re-entering it with the preferred artwork. I am using the latest updates (OSX 10.7.3, iTunes 10.6 (40)).

I can 100% confirm Hank's problem. I've read most posts about this and tried many "solutions" but besides deleting and re-adding a song to iTunes the cover art will always be reverted to the initial version that got uploaded to iCloud. It's pretty frustrating since updating cover art is a common task for me. I'm just wondering if Apple sees this a s a feature or a bug.

Hi,

I can confirm this problem already exists on iOS 5.1 and iTunes 10.6

This issue is still a problem. I just switched to iTunes Match as I was purposefully waiting until many of the growing pains would have been resolved. Album art is probably my most nit-picky thing I worry about. I keep very specific album art that is usually really high resolution. I use YouControl Tunes to display the currently playing song and it's album art.

This is making me want to turn off the iTunes Match. I am unaware why this can not be resolved. I see that it was brought up as early as the initial developer preview. I really hope Apple starts to care about customer feedback.

I would love to have an answer to this. For the time being, looks like to change album art you have to remove the album art, import the songs, delete from iCloud, add the album art to the new tunes.

That's stupid.

Hello,

I have same issue.

Did anyone tryied to "reset" the iTunes Match account, removing all songs from Cloud and match it all again?

Does it upload everything back in a clean way?

I activated iTunes match service the day after it was launched, it was with iTunes 10.5 and I suspect that at this time, the upload mechanism was still buggy for artworks and because of this, the music was uploaded with bad arwroks. I am wondering if reseting iTunes Match and reupload everything again now with iTunes 10.6 will make it better??

Chebu,

Yes I did try the "reset" iTunes method. Here is what I did (and I have 3 backups of my itunes library so I didn't really care about doing this)

1 - Turned off iTunes Match inside iTunes

2 - Deleted all songs from iTunes/iCloud

3 - Looked at MacBook Air library to make sure all songs were deleted, ran an update to itunes match. Showed 0 songs in the cloud.

4 - Wait 48hrs (not sure if this is necessary but wanted to make sure nothing was still cached on iTM side)

5 - Put all songs back, turned on iTunes Match.

Strange thing, NONE of my songs actually uploaded back to the cloud. They say uploaded but I have 16,000 tracks that say uploaded and there is no way it uploaded 16k tracks in under 5 minutes. Not sure what is going on there, but all other songs got the new artwork I had in iTunes where before they had old artwork. I am still having issues of changing artwork being replicated to the cloud. However now all my playlists are synching again which that for some reason stopped working.

IMO it seems iTunes Match is running 10x better than before. Its a lot snappier on 3g, no delays, just seems to be overall better. I am not sure why I had to go through all of this to get it to run smoothly, but being a day 1 adopter to iTunes Match in hingsight wasn't the best move.

**BE WARNED** I have over 25,000 tracks but 1200 or so are purchaed from iTunes Library. When I dragged these from a folder back into iTunes the kind shows "Purchased AAC File" but the iCloud description says MATCHED. This is counting AGAINST your 25,000 limit because when I dragged all 25,823 songs into iTunes 823 songs were over the limit and not added, even though they were legit purchases. After calling Apple and scouring the interwebs it looks like a MAJOR flaw on Apple's behalf and what you have to do is re-download all those tracks from your purchased link inside the iTunes Store. This is very time consuming for people who have a lot of purchased tracks and then cleaning up metadata and artwork is even worse. I finally re-downloaded all my 1200 tracks from the iTunes Store (some of them were no longer there so be careful, I had those just get matched/uploaded so I have the complete album). Just be warned if you have a large collection with a lot of purchases doing my "fix" above will get those to matched instead of uploaded.

Wow thanks a lot for your quick reply.

So this means that when iTunes re-processed the library after cloud reset, all customer artwork got uploaded to the cloud? Even for the songs purchased on iTunes Store?

Chebu

Chebu,

No worries, I just like to help anyone I can because I totally get the frustrations of iTunes Match.

I forgot to mention 1 thing, when I put all my songs back I had iTunes Match OFF. I then re-downloaded all the purchases from iTunes and did all my artwork/metadeta edits. I then made sure all the other artwork for my other tracks was solid and then I turned on iTunes Match and it seems for the most part everything is perfect now.

Like I said above changing artwork for tracks that already have it will save locally but not the cloud. Not sure what is going on there, but I am okay with that since I was so meticulous about having everything perfect after the purge that only like 3 albums have the wrong artwork. ALL of those are purchased tracks too...didn't notice that until right now. weird.

Jeff

Hmm so basically, by doing this method, the only drawback is to download back the purchased stuff from iTunes store. Then, any song for which we want to change artwork after song is in the cloud is to remove it and add it again, then correct artworks gets uploaded.

Did you notice a better matching rate than the first time?

Thanks again 🙂

Thats pretty much it....at least my experience, mileage may vary. :-)

No better matching..exact same.

Hey,

So I performed this risky operation yesterday and everything went as you said. Except the fact that my manual playlists got empty! I think it's because I forgot to turn iTunes Match off before saving the iTunes data files. I now also have to re-import my purchased music.

BUT: 100% of artworks in cloud are now mines (even for purchased tracks) across all iDevices. Just perfect.

AND: I got a slightly better result of matching. 15 more songs were matched actually 😉

Thanks a lot for your help Jeff!

Oh man that was TOTALLY my bad. I forgot to tell you that when you kill everything in iTunes Match it kills your playlists...well doesnt delete them just emptys them. I am SOOOO sorry. I forgot I had that same issue, ****. Sorry!!!

No worries man, glad you got it figured out...sorry again about the playlists!

No problem, I am happy to see everything is back in order with 100% of my artworks now 🙂

There is an interesting variant that I have tried succesfully with just a few tracks.

1. Switch iTunes Match off on the account where you keep your main library.

2. Use a newly opened Guest Account and activate iTunes Match. This gives you access to the songs in the Cloud without having them locally in that account's library.

3. Delete the songs for which you want to change the artwork. They are now no longer vailable in the Cloud.

4. Switch back to your main account, change the tracks in iTunes.

5. Switch iTunes Match back on.

Of course this is still elaborate, and I sure hope that Apple will fix this problem, but it does give you an opportunity to make just a few changes.

Actually to add onto this suggestion, you do not have to turn iTunes match off first.

I created a second user account specifically for iTunes Match that I will go in to to delete a song from iCloud. Switch back to the main account & the song will say 'removed'.

Make whichever changes I need to (ie. artwork)

Right click the file & click add to iCloud.

I'm still hoping for a true fix but in the mean time, it's not that bad.