Please confirm iTunes match does mess up album art.....

Yup, this has definitely happened to me, though it's very sporadic. I can listen to music for a whole day or two and have all of my songs have cover art, but then randomly the next album I listen to could have 50%-75% of its songs displaying the large music note.

I've been able to fix it on a case by case basis, but it's a pain. I have to open iTunes on my computer, remove the album from the cloud, remove the songs from iTunes, drag the songs BACK to iTunes, add them to the cloud again, and then download them on the phone again. Usually, the art appears this second time, but it's annoying when I have to do it for dozens of tracks at a time.

I have found that enabling 3G data under the iTunes Store settings menu* and just letting the songs play through downloads a lot of the album art for individual songs.

If you notice, the little network activity spinning star starts spinning when you play a song on your phone. If you wait until its done spinning, skip forward then skip back to the original song, the album art might be there ...

*Apple, why the f*ck do I have to change a setting for the "Store" app in order to change the way the "Music" App works? I thought you guys were the kings of logical UIs! That's some Android-level **** right there.

I haven't had this problem. Does't mean it isn't happening, just that it didn't happen to me.

I, too, have been experiencing this issue.

Coverflow shows all album artwork, but artwork does not display while in portrait mode. I hit the BACK button and then the NOW PLAYING button and suddenly the artwork will display properly ..... UNTIL the next song in the album plays, then the whole process repeats again with missing artwork being displayed as the songs play through the album.

This issue has been profoundly annoying and aggravating and has tarnished my iTunes Match experience.

All album artwork displays on my iMac without issue.

The only mentioned that I've been able to locate about this album art bug is from Walt Mossberg's iTunes Match review on November 30th:

I also ran into two Match problems on my iPhone and iPad that Apple says are bugs that will be fixed in an upcoming release of the operating system for those devices. One bug scrambles the alphabetical order of songs, albums and artists. Another causes album art to either never appear, or to show up only when a song is almost done playing. Apple won't say when the bug fixes will be ready.

I just posted about this issue in my post too:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3557833?tstart=0

I noticed that if you play the song and then navigate away and then go back to now playing it shows up fine!

Also, the album art will never show up on the lock screen unless the song is completely downloaded. Sometimes not even then even tho it shows up in the music player.

I hope they straighten these issues out.

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

Brad,

That might work if albums were "matched", but some of my albums that won't consistently display the album cover art were uploaded to the cloud.

I'm on a wireless broadband connection and am only getting something in the low hundreds of Kb on the upload side; it took several days worth of effort just to upload just 200 songs. I'm not going through that again, nor should I have to.

This "album art" bug is frustrating and is making me regret trying iTunes Match.

Mr. Cook (if you're reading this), I would appreciate an answer.

-joedy

I hear you. My upload is severely throttled, so it took days and days to get my 'uploaded' songs into the service.

What I discovered in my procedure is that (at least in my case), it didn't seem to matter what the iCloud status was--Purchased, Matched, Uploaded. It didn't seem to matter whether or not every track in the album had the same status. As long as I had the original files saved, things worked.

I too was worried about the length of time it would take to re-establish the 'uploaded' songs, but for some reason, it went MUCH faster--it felt like they weren't uploading every single song--but that they were cached out in the cloud.

I've seen the display bug you've mentioned on my iPhone 3GS. It frustrated me enough that I turned off iTM on the phone and went back to normal syncing. My experiments have been done between a master library on a Windows machine, and a 'client' MacBook Pro.

Perhaps after I see the MBP remain stable for a week or two, I'll turn iTM back on on the iPhone and see what happens...

brad

I have had the exact same problem and followed that same solution. Its totally random too. Some artwork is displayed and others are not. The cover art is my only issue with iTunes Match

Years 2014. Still the same problem. GG Apple. 😟