Album artwork not syncing on iPhone iOS 5.1 update

500 euros for an Ipad3.

for the last 2 months I am trying to figure out how to see the artwork on my songs in order to use the product I purchased and which was supposed to *show* album artwork among other things.

Apple has been promising the best user experience in the personal computing world but it is more than obvious that every year that passes it goes further away from this initial promise.

F*$K OFF Apple.

Steve Jobs is spinning in his grave!

FYI just upgraded to iTunes 11 and the problem still exists.

/counts days for when I can jettison this hoky device

Yesterday: No problem with album art on iPhone 4s.

Today: Many MP3s are without album art on iPhone 4s.

What changed between yesterday and today: I installed MediaMonkey.

Could this be the problem? YES.

The only files that were affected were the ones that MediaMonkey imported into its library. I stopped the process after it had imported about %10 of my MP3 collection (about 4000 files), and only those it imported are no longer displaying album art on my iPhone.

I am strongly convinced that this is a metadata issue. I used MP3Tag to completely remove metadata from an affected file, removed it from iTunes, then re-added to itunes and redid all the metadata... the album art was displaying once again on my iPhone after synchronizing.

I do not have the time and patience to redo metadata for 40000 files. Apple should address this ASAP. I know I'm at fault for having installed MediaMonkey, but iTunes/iOS should be robust enough that metadata seen in iTunes is displayed in iOS, and for that I point the finger at Apple.

Ugh. This happened to me tonight and it took quite awhile to figure out a fix.

BACKGROUND -- I have an iPod Touch 3G, 64gb. I am on iOS 5.1.1. I sync VBR MP3 files and I do no conversions upon syncing. Nor do I sync by wi-fi. With this setup I have been syncing without any major issues for years. I have about 6,000 songs on my Touch. Suddenly today right after a sync I noticed dozens of albums on my Touch had the wrong art. The covers were all correct in iTunes, but somehow on the Touch many were all mixed up. So I deleted all the music on my Touch and re-synced all music back to the device. This took hours.

PROBLEM -- While the covers were no longer mixed up, a new problem arose -- Now about 60% of the albums on my Touch had no art at all. Of course, as before, all the art was fine in iTunes. I tried syncing again a few times but it didn't fix things. Finally I figured out that anything which will cause an album to be imported again to the device will fix the missing art. So what's the most convenient way to do that? One way to do it is to remove the album from your library completely, then sync, put the album back into the library and then sync again. But this is a major pain. And simply adding back the cover art to the album won't make it re-import into the device.

SOLUTION -- So the simplest method I found was to write to an empty tag field, which will cause the song to be copied over again to your device. I chose the "Sort Artist" field. First select all the songs in an album, then select "Get Info" and go to the "Sorting" tab. In the "Sort Artist" field just type in the name of the artist ... or copy and paste in the name of the artist from the "Info" tab. If there was already an artist listed under "Sort Artist" what I did was delete it, then hit OK to save, then go back into the tracks and add the name of the artist back again. Now when you sync, all these tracks will be copied over to your device again, and the missing art should show up. Using this method, you can do all albums by a single artist at once. For example I have 13 Beatles albums in my library. So I sorted by artist, selected The Beatles, then selected all the tracks for the 13 albums at once and made the change.

This worked for me and hopefully it might help someone else. It's still a chore to fix it all, but at least doing it by artist makes it go a little faster.

This problem cropped up shortly after I installed the new iTunes 11 so I'm wondering if that caused the issue in my case.

krs10, first try sorting by artist in iTunes, then select all the tracks that come up for that artist, and then make a change to the "Sort Artist" tag field. If it's empty just add the name of the artist in there. If there is something already in the field, delete it, save the files, then go right back in and add the artist name back again. When you sync now, all those files you just changed will be copied over again to your device and the art should now show up correctly. It worked for me.

BTW, I too have Media Monkey on my laptop and use it from time to time for tagging. But I'm not sure that caused the problem in my case. However I will watch it carefully in the future just in case that's the cause of the problem.

I withdraw my MediaMonkey criticizm, unless of course it was that messed up my MediaLibrary.sqlitedb file.

I had tried your suggestion and had gone many steps further... I was not going to sleep until this was resolved.

<Link Edited By Host>

Here's a better guide:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3909940?start=0&tstart=0

No J@iLbR@ke required

krs10, thanks! That totally fixed the issue I was having. The key was deleting that DB file on the Touch, which must have been corrupted. Now all the cover art shows up fine.😀

Using the frree utility, iFunBox, I found the file on my Touch 3G at ...

"raw file system>user>media>iTunes_Control>iTunes"

My touch is "liberated" so I'm not sure if iFunBox will work on non-liberated devices. If you use this method, be sure to reboot your device after you delete the file, as mentioned in the second link to the instructions.

The only downside to this method is that it also re-loads your entire music library again. On my device it took well over 2 hours to complete. So if you have just a few albums not showing cover art or showing the wrong art, you might want to consider simply changing a tag field in the album. This works as well, and is what I had started to do before I tried deleting the Touch's media database file. But re-creating the database file, while it takes a long time, is actually a more complete and thorough fix, and is actually easy to do since it's mostly hands-off. When it's time to sync, just go to bed or have a nice lunch or dinner or something. When you come back, it will be all fixed!

Worked. Unbelievable. Thank you!

Only remaining issues are, why is Apple support so horrible, and hopefully I can keep that database from corrupting again.

Can you please be specific about which file you deleted. I tried to follow the stpes but it didn't work for me. And just to make sure we're on the same page the problem I have is that when I sync music with the "convert to 128 Kbps" option on then a lot of the artwork will not appear.

Morgann, the file you are supposed to remove is: MediaLibrary.sqlitedb.

Actually, don't delete it. Save it to your computer just in case something goes wrong and you need to put it back. But you shouldn't need to. Once you remove it from your iphone/Touch then be sure you reboot your device before syncing with iTunes.

What file did you remove?

The missing cover problem doesn't happen to just those who use the "convert to 128 Kbps" option. I've never used that option before and ran into the problem of missing album art on my iPod Touch.

I was deleting the MediaLibrary.sqlitedb-shm and the MediaLibrary.sqlitedb-wal files. Now that I delete the right one the problem seems to have been solved. Thank you, I was trying to solve this problem for months!

For a moment there I thought the problem was solved but after syncing more songs the problem is still there. Half of the album art will not show.

I tried deleting (or renaming with a "-backup" suffix) almost every file in the iTunes folder. It only randomly changed which artwork will appear and which one will not.

Praise be to PatNY! Here is exactly what I did to solve my album art problem on an iPhone running 6.0.1. I did a sync with iTunes (11.0) and then exited out of iTunes. Then, I used iFunBox to rename MediaLibrary.sqlitedb. I exited out of iFunBox and turned my phone off. I turned my phone back on, attached it to iTunes and ran a sync. It took 10 minutes or so but I got all my artwork back. I've been able to delete playlists and add new playlists and every time, I've gotten the right album art work. THANKS!