Apple Music/iTunes Replacing My Album Artwork

If you go into the Music tab in the Settings app, you can disable the iCloud Music Library. That will prevent Apple Music from interacting with what's saved on your phone and changing any of the artwork. Albums that have already been changed may need to be resynced. This doesn't prevent you from streaming from Apple Music, though it does prevent you from saving streamed playlists for offline use. Hopefully there's a better workaround than this, because right now it seems the only option is to do this and isolate your on phone library from the streaming one, or allow them to intermix and end up with wrong album art and multiples of the same song, sometimes not even the correct version.

Same for me. Missing and incorrect artwork through my library. Random, permanent edits to my files, on my hard drive. It's iTunes Match: The Sequel.

I can't believe they haven't fixed basic problems that have been plaguing paying customers for over three years now.

Check out similar posts from 2011 - 2013:

iTunes Match Changing My Album Tags/Metadata Without Asking

will my metadata change in iTunes match

iTunes Match vs. Play Counts

The only way around this right now is to turn off (in settings) "iCloud Music Library", this just means you can't play your Apple Music in offline mode though.

The only fix I can see coming for this is that a new setting is introduced that allows non-Apple Music music to not have album art and tracks changed.

As an early Zune Music Pass user, there was a specific setting in there which allowed non-subscription music to not have album art and tracks changed. This needs to be introduced on this.

I wouldn't mind if Apple Music played around with my album art, but just as long as it's correct. At the moment it's replacing them with incorrect album art.

Direct quotes from support:

"When the iCloud Music Library is enabled this will sync the album artwork from iTunes."

"The iCloud Music library places your music into iCloud which does update the album artwork to what appears in the iTunes store."

Like you all I'm very annoyed and disappointed, as I am also very protective of my album art.

She did say to submit feedback online, so I will- not sure if anyone will read it, but who knows.

www.apple.com/feedback

This is really annoying.

Sure thing.

1. First make sure your ICloud library is empty. I did this by copying my music folder to another location and then deleting everything in iTunes. Make sure you copy the folder so it doesn't try to actually delete all of your music.
2. With nothing in the library, disconnect from the Internet and copy your music back to the original iTunes location. I suggest copying instead of moving the original files because it will prevent you from having to manually enter the metadata yourself.
3. This step is optional, but I downloaded the program MP3Tag to work with metadata on a large scale instead of having to edit everything in iTunes.
4. I recommend doing this next step in small chunka instead of your entire library all at once. Readd the music to your iTunes library, make sure you're disconnected from the Internet still, and begin changing the song titles. If you're using MP3Tag, you can more easily change the song titles before readding them to iTunes. I made every song title "!" You don't have to change artist, album, genre, track number or anything else, everything should look like normal except the songs will all be "!"
5. Connect to the Internet and tell iTunes to Update the ICloud Music Library. After a brief scan, it will start to manually upload all of the music.
6. Once the music is uploaded, go back and change the song titles back to the correct title, and then tell iTunes to Update the iCloud Music Library again. If you're using MP3Tag, you can mass copy song tags to the new files so you don't have to manually change every song title. The songs you've uploaded are permanently recognized as the same song unless you delete them from iCloud, so you'll be able to watch on your device as everything changes. You can then edit anything about the album, and the files will be correct and the album art will be whatever you set it as on your computer.

I've done this for my entire library and I have no incorrect album art or mismatched songs because eveeything is uploaded directly from my computer. All of your music will be in the cloud and allow you to use all the functions of Apple Music without the service messing up any of your metadata. The only issue I can see is if the album you're working with has a song normally titled "!" In which case, name the tracks something else. Keep in mind, uploads were originally limited to 25,000 songs, though I believe with Apple Music the limit has increased to 100,000, so if you have more than that, you will run into problems. Matched songs don't count towards that limit. This guide specifically works for Apple Music, if you're just using iTunes Match, there's a pretty popular guide on the forums for force uploading there too, though it's much more difficult.

I admit that I am protective of my album art, I've got no problem if Apple Music updates them with the correct image - however, Apple Music is going through specific albums and replacing a single piece of album art with many different ones.

**** Freezes Over by The Eagles has had every single song replaced with a different image, only one song actually has the cover of **** Freezes Over. This is f'd up.

So Apple Music is actually incorrectly adding album art to the wrong albums and tracks...

Pulse by Pink Floyd has been replaced by the image for "A Collection of Dance Songs", Run Like **** from Delicate Sound of Thunder (live album) has been replaced by the cover for The Wall.

Something's actually wrong.

I Have the same issue, I don't want to downgrade as I really like apple music generally but i am very particular about album artwork and would appreciate it if someone could let me know if there is a way of getting around this

thanks

Same thing here. Really dissapointed because by switching off iCloud Music Library, I cant access the albums I've downloaded over the course of today unless I search them and stream them, which might be an annoyance if Im somewhere with poor signal.

Hopefully Apple fix this asap, or provide an option at least :/

I Removed all music from my phone - made sure I was logged out of my Apple ID on my phone and reconnected to Itunes and put all music back on - this seemed to solve the problem - It's a case of remembering to sign out of my Apple ID in settings every time before I sync my phone to iTunes.

this problem doesnt lie with iTunes though? It lies with Apple Music, quite specifically when the 'iCloud Music Library' is activated. So even if you do this, when you sign back into your Apple ID, Apple Music will change all the artwork again.

i deleted all my music and then went to settings music and made sure iCloud music library is turned off, re synced with iTunes 12.1 and all my own album art is back. yiu can still use all Apple music other than the offline mode.

if I update to iTunes 12.2 which introduces Apple music to the Mac is it going to automatically change all my album artwork before I can go into iTunes and turn I cloud music library off?

Dear Apple,

This is why people who don't buy your products don't buy your products but complain about them anyway.. Why a collection of songs with associated artwork should be mutilated by your ******** software is a mystery to, well, everyone not you.

I signed up for the free Apple Music trial on my iPhone because I was honestly curious. I was pretty happy with it when I used it yesterday, but today, when I went to play music I have on the phone, you had utterly ruined what I had spent hours curating over the years. Now, no matter how much I may enjoy Apple Music, I will be quitting it at the end of August, if not sooner.

Knock.

It.

Off.

Same here, turned 'iCloud Music Library off', restored my iTunes library from my Time Machine backup, and on my Mac everything is in good order again.

After fixing the iTunes part on my Mac, I synched my music to my iPad and iPhone 6 (both with the latest iOS 8.4 version). There I still have issues where mainly the pictures of the artists or completely mixed up.

I don't dare to turn 'ICloud Music Library' on, when I did that initially i completely screwed both Album Art, titles of the tracks, broke albums up in multiple albums. It was really a mess.

When I noticed the Artwork thing (Compilations Particularly a Mess, different art for most songs on every album) I immediately turned of "Show Apple Music", I never had "iCloud Music Library" turned on.

I went to iTunes, made a copy of the iTunes Library file in the iTunes music folder. Synced device, where I noticed that smart playlists had shrunk, 168 down to 140 etc. This was because all of my rated (Starred) music I'd purchased on the iTunes Store had somehow been put down to 1 star. 4 stars to 1, 3 to 1 etc. Anyone else have this?

Play counts were fine. Artwork was fine, and synced back to phone.

I disconnected iPhone, deleted iTunes Library File. Dragged back up in from earlier. Re-Synced. Seems Okay now.

Only thing is, some Smart Playlists are Duplicated on iPhone now. Some with artwork in Box beside playlist name in list view, some without.

Maybe updating to iTunes 12.2 will fix, maybe it won't...

Think I'll wait...

I love the up next feature on in the Music App though.

Hope this helps.