Q: iTunes 12.0.1 lost my album art
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Oct 25, 2014 9:38 AMby PaulSutton,I do not believe anything else has happened other than the upgrade.
I have a backup - a little old but not too bad - would be missing a few recent purchases - I realize I could restore - trying to avoid that at the moment.
Most of my library was/is hard-copy owned, and so I found the artwork myself (some good websites out there) - then would do a simple copy/paste into the album art page of the 'get-info' window.
By the way - as an update (something I looked at after posting the question - when I look at the music in explorer - it still shows the album artwork. So it is not 'lost', simply does not appear in iTunes anymore. Cannot determine any logical difference between the ones appearing and not appearing, as most were captured the same way though maybe not all from the same place (maybe different original file type - but don't believe so).
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Oct 25, 2014 9:38 PMby PaulSutton,Playing one or more songs does not bring back the album art.
Much of my library has been around since the release of the first iPod videos back in '05 - almost 9 years and no issues until this release of iTunes. I have seen comments around this sort of thing happening with other releases, and a few references to this happening with v12, but not much detail or any solution.
I am going to leave it alone for now, and hope a new version fixes the problem - not syncing again until I see the artwork back.
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Oct 26, 2014 3:53 AMby turingtest2,With iTunes closed backup the iTunes Library.itl file from your iTunes folder by copying to another folder such as your desktop, Then move the Album Artwork folder out of the iTunes folder, again perhaps to the desktop. Start iTunes. This forces iTunes to regenerate the artwork cache. Hopefully all embedded artwork should start to reappear as you go through the library.
tt2
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Oct 26, 2014 10:39 AMby PaulSutton,Gave it a shot - saw what you meant about rebuildling the cache - the ones it had before were blank - the ones it didn't have before already had the music notes placeholder. Over time, the ones that were there before reappeared - the missing ones, unfortunately, have not.
Appreciate the suggestion though.
Welcome any further thoughts.
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Nov 1, 2014 9:44 AMby Jay Bellissimo,I also had this problem. My artwork would show up as a small icon when I played a song or went to an individual song and did a "get info," (cmd-i) but when displaying the library as albums, all I got was grey boxes with music notes in them.
I accidentally solved it by invoking a library update and thought I'd share my experience in case it might work for you or anyone else having this issue. There may be a more efficient or better way to force this process, (anyone please chime in if there is) but I did it by directing iTunes to open a Previous Library, forcing quit and then re-orienting it to open the original library, which began updating and artwork began appearing.
Steps to accomplish this:
- Hold down the option key and click on iTunes to launch. You'll be presented with a choice to:
- A) Quit, B) Create Library C) Choose Library.
- Click on Choose Library and Navigate to a Previous Library and let it update for a while then force quit (opt-command-esc).
- Repeat that same step only this time navigate to the correct library.
- It will begin updating and finding the art work.
How I stumbled on it, if you're interested:
I'd recently had to restore my iPhone to factory settings and for some reason, my most recent backup didn't include my music nor did it have the playlist that I'd constructed of the music specifically gathered for syncing with my iPhone. Weird. Anyway...
I'm not sure how one ends up with "Previous Libraries" in their iTunes folder, but I decided I could probably open an previous library, see if it had my iPhone playlist in it and export/import that rather than having to construct another one from scratch. So I opened the most recent of my previous libraries long enough to export the playlist and when I returned to the most current library, it began "updating" the library and album art started popping up.
Good luck!
- Hold down the option key and click on iTunes to launch. You'll be presented with a choice to:
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Mar 30, 2015 5:04 AMby Paperone,Hi all,
I had the same symptoms with iTunes 12. Artwork wouldn't even sync to my iPhone anymore which was the most annoying part. Here is how I got everything back again. NB: My music library is stored on a NAS as well and if iTunes couldn't find the artwork I had the artwork .jpg previously embedded via "Get Info"/Cmd+i and paste into the artwork field.
Step 1: Getting Artwork to show in iTunes again
What finally (after many Cmd+i/Enter sessions and deleting the artwork cache) did the trick for me was the script "Re-embed Artwork v2.0" from Doug's Applescripts for iTunes: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=reembedartwork. This brought all the artworks back and iTunes hasn't forgotten them so far. NB: You can select multiple album at once and apply the script however the script will abort if there are missing files marked with "!" and you have to start again.
Step 2: Getting iTunes to sync to iPhone
(Before I tried unchecking "Sync Music" and sync and checking back on again but it didnt work)
Syncing with the iPhone after Step 1 solved most of the issues and artwork was updated on the iPhone.
The ones that still didn't work I cleared all artwork (cmd+i > Artwork tab > select artwork > cmd+del (if you are sure iTunes can "get album artwork") OR cmd+c to copy into clipboard) and then cmd+del > OK. iTunes should save the changes in each song of the album.
Next, sync with iPhone. Each song will be writing without the artwork to the iPhone.
After that, copy the artwork back into the album. Select album > cmd+i > artwork tab > cmd+v > OK.
Finally, sync music again.
NB: I could see that each time iTunes rewrote the whole file onto the NAS with ~7MBs over wifi. The same read speed when syncing to the iPhone.
What might be the problem why 're-embedding' or cmd+i& enter don't work is that the file size is not changing. Don't know how iTunes decides that a new version of the files is present and to trigger an actual copy. Even deleting iTunes own artwork, saving the file (without sync step here) and re-embedding it seems to result in the same file again which iTunes won't sync back to the phone. Keeps me thinking that writing an uncommonly used ID Tag into all files (might take a while) could trigger to copy all files with the next sync. After that you could delete the ID tag again. This could save the time to go through individual albums and sync without and with artwork again.
Hope that helps to solve this nuisance for most of you Good luck!
