Has anyone else had a problem with album artwork not showing up in the Music App since the recent iOS 5.1 update? i've tried restoring my iphone, changing the resolution of the artwork to 600x600, deleting all the music off and resyncing, and many other troubleshoots to NO avail. please advise if you have had a similar problem RECENTLY?
iPhone 4, iOS 5.1
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.
After some trial and error I come to find out it has to do with the converting bitrates of song to your device. I have an 8 gig iPhone 4 and like to convert my songs to 128kbps. Any song that is converted has no album art but ones that weren't will have. You can just uninstall iTunes 10.6 and install 10.5, you'll just need to find it to download just google it you should find it.
I can confirm this answer! You just have to reconvert your songs in iTunes instead of your iPhone (if you have it set to save space and convert to 128kbps or 192kbps for example). If you do this in iTunes first, then transfer the 128kbps or 192kbps or 256kbps songs with album art the sync them into your iPhone, all is better! It's not the permanent fix (maybe the next software update will help this), but at least it helps clean up the missing album art on the iPhone concern that many people have...
Agree that there is a problem consistently getting album artwork onto iPad & Ipod when manually installing with current versions of iTunes & IOS. Agree that the problem is associated with changing the bitrates of the song files. Have found that I get 100% installation of album art if I convert the songs to the file type and bitrate I want in iTunes before I transfer them. After I have finished & disconnected the device (iPad/iPod) I go back & delete the special versions I created. Time consuming but worth it if you want all your Album Artwork on your iPad, iPod or iPhone. Hope Apple fixes this problem soon.
Must say to that this applied to album art I got from other sources(e.g. Amazons & CD Universe) so the theory that Apple were turning the screws may be overstated.
Thanks. Yep...you're spot on. I didn't know how, and haven't time to look into it today, how to 'pre-convert' in iTunes, but, just as an experiment, I deleted two albums from my phone and this time set iTunes to NOT change the bit rate, just to transfer them to my phone 'as is'. Low and behold all went perfectly and the artwork is now on my phone. Thanks for your help. It just means that I now I have larger files sizes for each music track on my phone although, as I said before, I don't keep all my music on it (I'd need a phone with 160 gb of memory! lol) so it's not a major issue for me. Be glad when Apple finally sort the problem though so everything 'Just Works' again! lol Thanks again for your assistance and explanation as to what was going wrong. Regards, Dave x
I have my library in AAC lossless format and I check the box to compress music when syncing. iTunes now removes all artwork when transferring music to my iPod touch. I have contacted support and they have confirmed this as a bug/change but the rep suggested that to insure that it gets fixed that everyone should submit feedback....soooo....please do so!
I had this problem as well, and what fixed it for me was replacing my album art with a differently-sized version of the cover; if I had a 1500 x 1500 version of the cover, I would simply replace it with a smaller 1000 x 1000 version. It might be tedious to hunt down new album art depending on how many albums aren't syncing with album art, but nothing else worked for me.
Not whining about Apple in any way, but if by "solution" you mean PLA's comment that the only way to retain the artwork on downward converted files is "to TURN OFF the 'Convert Higher Bit Rate Songs to 128 AAC' on your device," I've got to disagree with you. It is, in fact, the convert feature that is broken, as of the last update (it worked perfectly well before.) "If it's broke don't use it anymore" is certainly a logical response to something that doesn't work properly, but it ain't a solution.
I've tried all the things mentioned in this thread and nothing changes the fact that "convert to 128 AAC" now removes the artwork from the files it converts. Of course, I imagine that creating new, duplicate files in iTunes at 128 and copying them to your iPhone instead of the higher-rate files, as one commenter suggested, would "work" too, but only because the convert feature that is not working won't be part of that process at all. I lost interest trying to do that halfway through typing that sentence. Synching between iTunes and your iPhone shouldn't be that much of a hassle, and it sure didn't used to be.
(Kind of curious, btw, if this also happens with iPod Touches: I mean, I guess it would, wouldn't it?)
Space (i.e., more songs) is more important to me than the pretty pictures, so for now my approach is just "live with it and hope it gets fixed somehow in a future update" (i.e., solution!) But I'd prefer to have both the pictures and the files, and of course I'll keep checking this thread to see if anyone figures out something better than just living with it.
As always, appreciate the help.
I have done the following and got all artwork back.
1. Unsync all music first to delete all songs from iPhone.
2. On iTunes in windows explorer right click and in properties restore to previous version of iTunes
3. Again sync music
Got all songs synced with artwork. You can try your luck
This is the same problem I was looking for an answer to. So far the only thing I've found is to NOT check the Convert higher bit rate songs option on the iPod/iPhone. If you leave the songs they way they are, the artwork is there, whether they are AAC or MP3. It appears to be a bug in iOS. Hoping they can come up with a fix soon as it is very frustrating.
I noticed this annoying problem a few weeks ago but didn't really search for a solution.
Thanks to the help of everyone on here I found a solution that worked for me.
Once I un-clicked the "convert higher bit rate songs to..." box and added the songs that would not transfer the artwork to my iphone, it worked.
The weird part is that if there was art work on my itunes and I transfered it to my ipod shuffle and ipad, the art work would show up fine, it would only not show up on my iphone
I did restore my iPhone to factory settings after upgrading to iOS 6. Started from scratch and it still doesn't work.
@madswine
The reason the artwork syncs for you now is you haven't clicked the "Convert my music to xxx Kbps" in iTunes after restoring your iPhone. As discussed before in this thread, this is the issue. Songs that are being compressed to a lower bitrate in iTunes before being transferred to the iDevice don't show artwork on the iDevice.
If you don't compress your songs, the artwork will show up on your iDevice.
I have found a solution. It is very simple, in fact.
> Remove the feature "Convert songs which have a debit superior to 128 kbit/s".
> Go to a song and right-click on it.
> Chose the feature "Create an AAC Version".
> When the AAC version is created, delete the other version (or let it, if you want).
> Just put the song in AAC version (which have an album artwork, of course) in your iPhone.
> Check your song in the iPhone... It is done !
[sorry for my bad English, I am French]
I tried disabling the downsampling and it worked but i didnt want to have huge files on my iphone and wanted all my music to be there. What i tried was weirdly simple but it worked, not sure why...
I just de-selected all tracks and enabled 'sync all checked tracks' in order to erase all my music.
Then i just simply tried to drag & drop tracks (individually or in groups) and the artwork started to appear again... no effin' idea why but it works this way. I didnt even have to uncheck downsampling or convert ID3 to 2.4....
Go figure...
Tried everything from the start of the post. Did not solve it.
What I did.
Select all the songs
Get info
Options tab
Change media to audiobooks
After changing it, change it back to music
Sync
You'll see all your artwork will go back
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.
Album artwork not syncing on iPhone iOS 5.1 update
