iTunes 12.9 loses album artwork after every update

This is an issue with just 1 album; however, last night in my attempt to fix it I've now somehow managed to rename half of my library to that album. This happened when I tried to merge two albums (one of which is the album in question and another with the same title) by highlighting the two of them, selecting "get info", under details in the "album" line I typed the album title I wanted them both under so they would merge. When I clicked "ok" it processed and then half of my library has that album title.

This change has updated my library in the cloud also.

I decided the quickest way would be to restore my library from a backup I have. I deleted the library and reinstalled it but when it started to sync with the cloud the cloud started overwriting the actual album titles with the messed up one.

Where is this "keep my iTunes library files organized" ?

I checked a few things and there didn't appear to be anything in the work fields. I don't want to check all of them because it would be such a huge waste of time and I have more important things to do.

Is this an issue with just the one album or all of your music files? If it's just the one, I would try deleting those files from iTunes and then re-importing them.

I have, it did not resolve the issue, sadly.

For those of you helping I created a question for my issue so we don't have to continue filling up this forum as the issues are separate.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250209531

Did you apply to enclosed items anyway? This forces the permissions to be updated on each subfolder. There is no way to tell by looking at the top folder if they are already set correctly everywhere inside. You can try scrolling through the library in different views to see if it will reveal what is embedded. You can also select the library and use the right-click > Download Artwork option to have it try to download art for anything that doesn't have it embedded already.

tt2

Amighty, you mad genius. You have saved me much $$ in therapy. This just started happening today. I disconnected from Airplay and suddenly I can save changes again. Must be heavy sunspot activity or something...?

No, some albums have been merged also. I.e. A movie soundtrack album has another video game soundtrack listed as part of that album.

How do I export the corrupted data?

finally, I got off the phone with apple support and someone is going to call me back. Unfortunately, however my iCloud version of my library has also been affected. I deleted and replaced the iTunes folder with my backup and once it synced with my library it changed the albums into their corrupt state.

I've had the same problem, but as soon as I turned airplay off I was able to add artwork.