Fortunately this is a facelift that can easily be reversed! I'm now back on 10.7, PHEW! Got my album art back, and enjoying the fact that everything is back to normal. It is official, iTunes 11 *****!

Apple, one bite too many, sort out iTunes 11, it is total pantaloons! Look at 10.7 and add the additional functionality without losing the "existing" functionality.

Now off you go and sort it out you Apple bods!

ITUNES 11 =

That's ONLY for the song that is playing.  If you are crusing through your library or have another song selected then the art does NOT change to reflect to song you have selected.

The TINY little album art is really an insult.   It's as if they intentionally made it so small you can't see it.

Please fix this ASAP! I loved looking at the artwork in the lower left corner! It was the first thing I noticed when iTunes 11 installede! I don't like how you removed the album art displayed!!!!!!!!!

Adding my voice to this loud chorus.  That's the first thing I noticed, too - where the heck is the album art?  I spend a frustrating half hour trying different settings combinations to see if there was a simple option that I had not considered.  I then stumbled onto this thread...

What is evern more confounding to me is that if you play the songs through an attached iPhone, there is no album art at all, not even the puny thumbnail in the section at the top.   This looks like a bug to me.

Also, urelatedly, the Play Counts appear to update only about 2/3 of the time.

Bring back the arrows at the top of the art preview window which allows scrolling through multiple album art

Agreed. This must be changed. Album art was the thing that converted me to Apple years ago. I must have this change reverted if I'm to stick with iTunes 11.

I, as many users have said on this fourm, noticed this change as soon as I updated to 11. 

Okay, when you have 25,000 plus songs I do not want to have to scroll through a bunch of cover images and guess that a songs on what album. The Songs list is the only way I browse music and taking away the perfect scrolling in iTunes 10 where each album is split up but the cover photo was perfect! Now it's just a huge list of text! Plus they took out the feature of making text smaller. 

Completely agree this is BS

Right click on the album, click on "get info", double click on the album artwork box and place whatever artwork you want there. Features in itunes 11 work fine.

I have "downgraded" to version 10.4.0.80 for Windows and everything is as it should be! This should work for the Mac version as well.

Art preview window works and has arrows for multiple artwork! List view is great.  Coverflow works!  Over 50,000 songs and iTunes seems responsive (so far).

Pointed iTunes at the music folder and re-created the iTunes Library.  Only glitches were Date Added date reset to re-install date and Playlists lost.  Opened old iTunes Library.xml file and used text editor to extract names and contents of Playlists and re-built them.  Learned to live with Date Added thing.

Aahhhh...now iTunes is good like a music player and database should (be)!

Forget v.11!!

I think you are confusing the issue, davinguest. You are talking about placing Artwork for an album or song that didn't previously have Artwork (or replacing it). What we are referring to is the ability in previous versions of iTunes to click on a track -- without playing it -- and the Preview box would show the Artwork for the selected track. The window used to have two options: Now Playing and Selected Item. The Selected Item option is now gone and only Now Playing remains (if you click on the little icon of the track playing, a window showing full size Artwork appears). And features in iTunes 11 do not work fine. If they do, please elaborate. The features in iTunes 11 may work, but they are not fine.

Ranting aside, the main issue with iTunes 11 is not the engine -- like Windows 8, the core works great, but the interface begs otherwise. iTunes 11 may be Simplicity Itself, but it is too simple.

Nah, it *****.

I have found a way to add the album art to multiple songs at once. 

• Find the artwork on the internet such as Google, etc. that you want to use.
• Drag the artwork to your desktop.
• In iTunes, highlight the songs you want (using shift) and then press ⌘i.
• Check the Artwork button and then click on the empty white box.
• Drag the artwork file from your desktop into this white empty box. 

It will now update and use that artwork for all of the selected songs.

You can delete the image from your desktop when you are done, everything will save.

If anyone has found an easieir way, please let me know.

Hope this helps.

(⌘ = command)

Zef7, do the same steps except:

• Find the artwork on the internet and right-click Copy image.
• Same steps for selecting songs
• Command + V (Paste) into the artwork box.

No need to drag anything.

I'm glad that we've found a way to still mass-update Album Artwork (I was worried that was gone forever too), but at the same time it's still a lot harder to tell WHICH songs need album art without the preview window in Song view. Still don't understand why that option would be removed.