Is there a way to rebuild the iTunes Library like you can rebuild the iPhoto and Photos Libraries? I tried holding down the command & option/alt keys while opening iTunes and that didn't work. I lost a lot of my album cover artwork and wondered if a rebuild would help. Using iTunes 12.4.1.
Initial post to recover artwork:
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5), 2008 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo, 6 GB RAM
See this User Tip from turingtest2 if your iTunes Library also happens to reside on an iOS device.
Thanks for the user tip I hadn't seen. Unfortunately, there are very few songs on my iPad.
It sounds as if you are not in a catastrophe situation ... but simply missing artwork. So might it be possible to first move the missing iTunes library components to the iPad, and then recover the library from the iPad back to iTunes?
đ That could be possible, but having to find 219+ albums is more effort than I am willing to expend for missing artwork. I was looking for a simpler fix, if anyone knew of one.
When did the artwork go? Do you have a backup? Is art generally embedded?
tt2
The artwork disappeared when I went from iTunes 11.X (4?) to iTunes 12.
I do have a backup from 2014 to present day, but I don't know what files to restore to get the artwork. If I restored the entire backup from Sep 2015, would it work with the current iTunes (latest version)?
I don't understand your 3rd question.
iTunes creates an Album Artwork folder inside your main iTunes library folder. Inside this are a number of artwork cache folders. Art can be embedded in the tags of most audio files, in which case iTunes will create a record in the cache folder. Alternatively if the tag doesn't contain artwork iTunes may attempt to match the track with one in the iTunes store and if found the artwork is placed in the download folder. If media with embedded art is removed and reimported or transferred to another library the art should always go with it. For store downloaded art there is chance that different attempts to fetch the artwork may or may not succeed. If iTunes fails to get album artwork then it may be that the album details don't quite agree with what is in the store in which case making them match might help. In practice it is generally easier to find the art on the net and paste it in yourself.
If the artwork cache isn't updating properly then it might pay to delete the Album Artwork folder which will force iTunes to rebuild it. Once you have done this you can scroll through the library in the album/grid mode and iTunes should repopulate the cache for each album as it goes. See Doug's Scripts - Embed Art for a script that embeds any store art before you start so that you won't lose any images that you already have. With luck iTunes will be able to fetch images for at least some of your albums that currently don't have art, after which you can manually search for and add images for those that remain empty. Manually added art is always embedded. Note that art can be associated with tracks in .wav format, but cannot be embedded as there is no tag.
tt2
Thank you tt2.
I ran the script you posted and recovered about 157 more artwork covers. I checked a few of what is still missing to see if it was available from the iTunes Store. It wasn't, which explains why iTunes can't recover it.
Thanks to you, this is solved as far as I am concerned. If I want to find the rest, I'll use your suggestion and look for the covers on the net.
Thanks again.
You're welcome. đ
tt2
iTunes Library Rebuild
