Transferred my iTunes library to new Windows 10 pc and about 50% of the album artwork did not copy. Tried the add on search features (including the "Get Info" link to each album) but got the "not available" response.
Music seems to play normally, just no longer have the artwork.
Windows 10, 64 bit, Intel i7 processor, 16 gb memory, 1tb hard drive, iTunes version 12.6.1.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Obviously doing something wrong here. I printed out the instructions you provided, then completely uninstalled itunes and library from new computer to start over. I had my library backed up on an external hard drive so I tried to manually transfer my library by dragging it to the Music folder in new pc which took about 45 minutes. But no link to itunes on my desktop so I downloaded (again) itunes; then I clicked on File/Add Folder to library, highlighted all of the folders containing my music and clicked Select but it still didn't load music into my itunes.
So I uninstalled everything again and went back to what worked the first time (partially), installed itunes again and transferred music from laptop to new desktop via Home Sharing - six hours later 92 gb of music is back again on my desktop but STILL many albums with no artwork. I can literally see the artwork on certain albums from my library on my laptop but not on my desktop.
I've got my music, just not the artwork - frustrating, but could be worse. I remember earlier versions of itunes would let you copy and paste artwork that it couldn't find but I guess Apple decided to remove that feature as well.
Think I'll just learn to accept it - this is way over my head - just not that computer literate. Thanks anyway.
A follow up - thought I was on to something after watching many You Tube videos on the subject - I Googled the name of the albums, found the image I was looking for and saved it to my desktop; went back to the album with the missing artwork, clicked "get info/artwork/add artwork, found the image and after inserting it by clicking on it I clicked OK and the artwork appeared on the album.......................BUT, after doing this for about five or six albums, with many more to go, it stopped working for some reason. I have images saved this way for many more albums but can't get them to load into my itunes.
Don't suppose you'd have any idea why this procedure stopped working all of a sudden would you?
Didn't take my own advice by leaving well enough alone; kept studying your reply regarding the inability to add artwork to .wav files, and after further examination discovered that practically all of the problem albums were in .wav format. I opened each album in iTunes, clicked file/convert/create AAC version and each file was duplicated into M4A version. Then I went back and deleted each .wav version and closed the album. Occasionally after doing this the artwork would appear but if it didn't I Googled the album, searched for the album cover I wanted, right clicked on it and selected "save image as", selected desktop and gave it a name and clicked "save." Next I right-clicked on the album and selected get info/artwork/add artwork, selected the appropriate album cover where I had saved it (desktop) and after clicking OK the artwork appeared in the album.
This worked so well that I even got artwork onto albums that I previously didn't have artwork on. I would like to do the same with the albums that I have in my laptop that are missing artwork - BUT - before I do I wanted to run this by you to see if you know of any potential problems I may have later on down the road. It's been about a week since I made the changes above and everything appears to still be working OK so far. Also I have an iPod classic but I haven't tried syncing these new and improved albums yet.
Would very much appreciate your thoughts please.
Uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes should have no impact on the library.
When the library is moved as a unit the database and artwork cache will end up in the right place on the new computer, or you connect to the database on the external drive if you prefer. Either way it isn't necessary to add folder to library, because when you open the library all of the media will be listed.
tt2
Totally agree - it didn't have any impact; I just did it to "wipe the slate clean" so to speak, and start over from a new install - figured it couldn't hurt anything.
This is the fifth time that I've transferred my library over to a new pc (actually the sixth considering I did it twice on this pc already) and the FIRST time I've ever had a problem like this. I can literally see the artwork on my laptop library so why it didn't transfer the exact same data from that laptop after six hours of transfer time via home sharing is unknown to me.
Totally agree - it didn't have any impact; I just did it to "wipe the slate clean" so to speak, and start over from a new install - figured it couldn't hurt anything.
This is the fifth time that I've transferred my library over to a new pc (actually the sixth considering I did it twice on this pc already) and the FIRST time I've ever had a problem like this. I can literally see the artwork on my laptop library so why it didn't transfer the exact same data from that laptop after six hours of transfer time via home sharing is unknown to me.
Well, I opened the link you provided and frankly it was like trying to read a Greek document in that it made no sense whatsoever. So I opened it up again on my laptop just so I could follow the instructions to the letter and after doing so it resulted in absolutely no change; in fact, when I went back to put things back the way they were I discovered that everything was just the same as it was before I started - in other words what I did didn't amount to a hill of beans!
What I can't understand is that all of these songs in .wav format have the album artwork in my library loaded into my laptop but when I copy this very same library from this very same laptop into my new computer, for whatever reason, all of the artwork does not copy.
This is all way beyond my pay grade and I think I'm going to just leave well enough alone since I've still got all of my music which did transfer as I had hoped for - I'll just have to ignore the fact that many of the albums don't have the artwork - something I feel I can get used to.
I thank you for your help in trying to resolve this problem.
Well, I opened the link you provided and frankly it was like trying to read a Greek document in that it made no sense whatsoever. So I opened it up again on my laptop just so I could follow the instructions to the letter and after doing so it resulted in absolutely no change; in fact, when I went back to put things back the way they were I discovered that everything was just the same as it was before I started - in other words what I did didn't amount to a hill of beans!
What I can't understand is that all of these songs in .wav format have the album artwork in my library loaded into my laptop but when I copy this very same library from this very same laptop into my new computer, for whatever reason, all of the artwork does not copy.
This is all way beyond my pay grade and I think I'm going to just leave well enough alone since I've still got all of my music which did transfer as I had hoped for - I'll just have to ignore the fact that many of the albums don't have the artwork - something I feel I can get used to.
I thank you for your help in trying to resolve this problem.
Converting from wav to acc will have decreased the quality a bit. Whether or not that is significant only you can tell. Hopefully you still have the originals somewhere. If you want to go back to the original quality then you can use a script called ConvertFormat to switch the originals into AppleLossless. It takes care of the housekeeping after each track is converted.
I find iTunes and iDevices work best if all tracks have embedded art. I have two scripts that can help with this; CreateFolderArt and EmbedFolderArt. The scripts have slightly different functions:
CreateFolderArt ensures that every album folder ends up with a Folder.jpg image which is the art that iTunes already knows about. Side effects are that if artwork has been updated in iTunes the folder art should be updated also, and if any track from the album doesn't have embedded artwork it gets embedded.
EmbedFolderArt was actually written for someone who already had various artwork images stored in the album folders and wanted them added to their tracks, but not if iTunes had already downloaded a better quality image. It creates new files of any store art with the name iTunesArt.jpg, then embeds the largest image by area in the album's folder, based on the premise that this is likely to be the best image.
In either case you could search and destroy the images in the folders after they are embedded if you don't want them.
tt2
See Move your iTunes library to a new computer. If you move your library properly it will include the artwork cache.
tt2
You cannot add your own artwork to tracks in .wav format. Otherwise see Repair security permissions for iTunes for Windows.
tt2
half of my album artwork on new Windows 10 pc did not transfer
