iOS 8 Remote update not displaying album art of currently playing album

Well then...you're lost. And...welcome to our nightmare.

My iPhone 4S works, my iPad2 works, my iPad Mini (Retina) does not. Alas the Mini was purchased expressly to serve duty as an Audio Server remote. This was the case prior to IOS8 and did not change after IOS8 was released (along with all of it's revs so far).

It has been posited elsewhere that the problem is attached to Retina displays. No idea whether that holds true or not. On my end there aren't enough specimens to experiment with.

....sT

"Ever since October 2011, I am not as enthralled as I once was. I know that I certainly feel more and more betrayed of late."

Couldn't agree more - potentially fantastic products, but sales figures have beaten solid hardware and software development and testing.

Finally solved with today's app update.

Thanks for the heads up Nezmo. Didn't see the update.

Hassah!!!!

While I've yet to have the time to really put it through it's paces....the appearance is that 4.2.2 has fixed the problem. I'm not yet ready to state unequivocally that it's been fixed...but that is the appearance as of this writing.

I'm afraid, though, that I cannot offer any thanks to Apple or their drones for attending to the matter. As Nicholas has stated....it only took them SEVEN MONTHS to do it. This is just as inexcusable as the problem itself. Especially when one piles on the fact that Apple did everything within their power to ignore the problem and to ignore and silence those of us who tried repeatedly to report it and seek a remedy. This is NOT the Apple of days past. Clearly that Apple has gone the way of the dodo.

So...while I am glad that the problem is fixed, I am NOT glad it took nearly a year for them to get around to it. That borders on negligence. and compleat apathy.

The best I can offer is....it's about F'ing time!!!

....sT

PS.... to the Apple Police who will undoubtedly read this and censor it, as they have done with every other post which does not drunkenly sing the Party song and madly wave the Party flag.......I dare you not to on this occasion. Even YOU must realise that Apple dropped this ball in a big way.

I don't think that I'd be able to sleep at night if I didn't hang onto a copy of 4.2.

I'm happy this is done and over.

Now I'm just going to hide under the blankets in fear and wait to see what blows up next.

Finally! Now all we need is to back up this app version in case Apple decides to break it again 🙂

Just got the update. All excited. I love my album art.

Too bad it doesn't always work.

Sometimes still doesn't show art, even after playing through entire song and even though art is displayed in iTunes.

Sometimes it shows the previous artist's album art for the current track.

Now I'm hoping for a fix to the fix.

iPhone 6, ios 8.3 (12F70), Remote 4.2.2, iTunes 12.1.2.27 64-bit (Windows 7)

I agree with cugms - the 4.2.2 update does not always work. Still waiting for a fix to the fix!

Some have commented that if you "move around" in iTunes, that seems to unstick the communications between iTunes and the remote app, thus temporarily causing some of the artwork to load on the remote app. I have notice that too. (I am running iTunes 12 for Windows, 64-bit.)

The other thing I noticed is that I can trick the remote app to load the artwork if I go into iTunes and open the preferences dialog and just leave "General Preferences" dialog open on the PC. Then all the artwork loads fine on remote app for iPad and iPhone. I am not saying this is a solution, or even a reasonable workaround. But it does work for me. I just want to see if someone else can recreate this effect where leaving the preferences dialog open in iTunes has a positive effect on loading the album art on the iOS device running the remote app. It seems to keep the communications open.

To recap - open "General Preferences" in iTunes on the PC first, and leave that screen up - then open the remote app on your iOS device and see if it is loading the artwork properly.

I am having the same issue with cover art not displaying in the remote app on my ipad, and ALSO in the Retune app on my Android phone. Everything was fine until I updated to the newest version of Itunes (12.2.1.16). I was pleasantly surprised to find that Straightbourbon's solution of keeping the options window opened actually does appear to fix the problem, albeit temporarily. I have no idea how or why this works, but thank you very much for the tip!

Thanks Nightwolf67 for the feedback! My feeling is that the issue has something to do with iTunes, although it does seem to manifest itself differently on various versions of the remote app, and various devices, iOS versions, etc. It's very interesting that you are seeing this problem on an android device as well.

Is it something specific to a particular platform that iTunes runs on?? I am running 64-bit iTunes on Windows 7. What platform do you run your iTunes installation on?

If it is not something specific to the iTunes installation, then perhaps it has something to do with a setting somewhere? I have tried messing with almost any setting I can think of. I have logged in and out of my iCloud account, etc. At one point, there was some talk about a setting called "show itunes in the cloud purchases" under the store tab in settings. That setting is totally missing from my iTunes. I have a 32-bit iTunes running on a Vista box, and the setting was missing there as well until I tried logging out and back into my iTunes account a few times, and somehow, it came back. Not sure if this has anything to do with the remote issue or not.

I am also running itunes on 64-bit win7. I read elsewhere that that seems to be the main offender. I actually had this same issue last year and after much research and troubleshooting, I was able to fix it by highlighting all my songs, right-clicking and selecting convert all Id3 tags to version 2.4. At least I thought that was what fixed it. Maybe it was a combination of things, but it was definitely working right after that. So naturally when the problem returned again last week, that was the first thing I tried to fix it - but with no luck.

I think they just screwed up the whole Artwork thing in the Info pane. You used to be able to right-click and copy and paste cover art, but now that's gone for some reason. Even when you left click on artwork, sometimes it take a while for the blue box to appear around it. Something's definitely not right. I just keep hoping some day they'll fix everything with an update, but who knows how long that'll take.

I would have to agree that the problem is somewhere within iTunes, which then manifests itself differently on different versions of the remote app, depending on what iOS device you run remote on, and what version of iOS you are using. For example, I am running an old version of the remote app on iOS 5 on an iPod Touch 3rd gen. It does not have the exact same problem as my iPad 2 with latest iOS and latest Remote app, but it still does not display everything that it used to. It has that "getting stuck" feeling to it, similar to the iPad, but not exactly the same. The iPad actually works a little better. And yes - my "iTunes fix" (keep Preferences dialog open in iTunes) does work for the old remote app on the iPod touch as well.

Another thing I discovered is that this issue may not be limited to the way that iTunes communicates with the remote app. For example, the other day, I was streaming my iTunes music to my Apple TV. The artwork would intermittently not display on the Apple TV! Sometimes it would, sometimes it would not. (And yes - I double checked that the track had artwork on it by looking at iTunes on the PC while that track was playing.)

Then I tried my "trick" of keeping the preferences dialog open in iTunes. (As stated previously and confirmed by Nightwolf67, this has the effect of keeping the communications to/from iTunes flowing when using the remote app,) i.e. remote app does not get "stuck" when displaying artwork. In this case, the trick also "fixed" the problem of the missing artwork on the Apple TV!

Note that I was not playing the music FROM the Apple TV by accessing Computers and then my iTunes library, but rather playing the music in iTunes itself, and then selecting the Apple TV as remote speakers.

I wish Apple would take a closer look at the iTunes code and see if they can recreate the problem (should not be hard), and then fix it. I guess there must be so few people out there using the remote app to control iTunes that this issue has never really gotten that much attention from Apple.

Well, I was hoping that somehow the problem would go away if I upgraded my PC to Windows 10, but unfortunately it hasn't. In fact, after the "upgrade", itunes would not start at all. I tried doing a Repair install which didn't help, then I completely uninstalled all Apple software and reinstalled it which still didn't help. Then I realized that the only way to get it to start was to right-click on the icon and select 'Run as Administrator' which makes no sense since obviously I am an Admin on my own PC!

But anyway, as I said, the cover art problem still exists. 😟