Cover art missing in iTunes Match after adding new ones.

Question

Level 3

592 points

Cover art missing in iTunes Match after adding new ones.

I've spent a lot of time adding missing cover art to hundreds of classical music albums that I've ripped from CDs recently.

However, when I pull up the Albums list on my iPhone, connected via iTunes Match, I see some of the new covers there, but many are still missing. I've shut down the Music app on my iPhone and restarted, and it loaded a few more covers, but, many are still missing. I've also forced an iTunes Match update a few times, but, doesn't seem to change things.

I've looked at the file size of some covers, and they aren't out of the ordinary compared to many other covers that are loading just fine, even some with covers that are over 400k in size are loading, while ones that are under 100k are not loading.

Why would iTunes Match not be loading some of the covers on my iPhone and iPad? Anything I can do to fix it other than re-importing all those covers again?

Posted on Jul 9, 2014 11:58 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

BernardMR

Level 1

71 points

Jul 10, 2014 4:59 AM in response to TomNYC

I have had the same experience as you.

I spent hours adding missing cover art.

My advice is to be patient and wait sometimes for days: in my experience, iTunes Match eventually pushed ALL the cover art to my iPhone and iPad.

Just one note of caution: if you have an album by one artist and one or more of the tracks on it has more than one artist (for example, a duo), make sure that you copied the cover art to all the tracks including the tracks containing the duo.

I hope this helps.

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Answer 2

TomNYC Author

Level 3

592 points

Jul 10, 2014 11:40 AM in response to BernardMR

It's odd. Many of the covers I added showed up right away. I realized one album cover was wrong, updated it on my computer, and the new album cover was pushed to my iPhone within a few seconds. I also made sure to add the cover art via the Artwork box for the whole album and not just one individual song.

However, there are many album covers still not showing up. I realized there are lots of album covers for music I've had for more than a year that are not showing up on my iPhone or iPad. Even things I bought from the iTunes Store. I don't have any hope that those album covers will ever show up at this point, but, I thought at least he new ones I added manually would.

I also tried playing a track or two on the album. Sometimes that works, usually it doesn't. Seems to be very inconsistent which album covers are carried over and which aren't.

Thanks!

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Answer 3

KANDAQ

Level 1

43 points

Jul 11, 2014 1:15 AM in response to TomNYC

In my case, the album art never got updated on iTM if it's already matched/uploaded before. What I had to do was remove these songs from iTM, and rematch it.

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Answer 4

Jul 11, 2014 1:42 AM in response to TomNYC

Is your album cover issue resolved?

If not, have you perhaps tried to disable iTunes Match on your iPhone (in Settings) and signed out of your Apple ID (on the phone)? This might work.

The issue seems to be that the iTunes Match server does not update all the tracks with the new album cover art, particularly if you added the covers some time after importing the CD's (remember then that there was no cover art on some of them!)

Another possible solution is to rename the iTunes database (.itl file) by appending say "old" (without the quotes) and recreate a new one with maybe 1 or 2 albums, wait for the server to match the tracks (you can check on your iPhone after disabling and then re-enabling iTunes Match on the phone), then delete the 1 or 2 albums so that the iTunes music library is empty and wait again; you can check the iPhone again.

Finally, quit iTunes, delete the latest database and rename the original database with its original name (by removing the "old" appendage).

Then let iTunes Match reload the server with all the information: this might take a few minutes (hours?) depending on the size of the library.

In the meantime you can remove all the music on the iPhone by disabling iTunes Match in the phone's settings.

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