Album Art Problem

[profbobo]

I have had consistent and reproducible problems adding album art to newly added music; has anyone else encountered this? The album art shows up fine in iTunes, but when some (not all) songs are played, they'll lack album art and, worse, be truncated by about seven seconds. The problem only seems to happen when I add album art to music I have just added to the iPod; unmounting it and remounting, then adding artwork seems to solve the problem.

Just wondering if this (rather strange) problem has happened to anyone else.

[jhollington]

Well, I wish I could be of more assistance, but all I can say is that it hasn't happened to me, and I took a great deal of time and effort to go out and hunt down album art and add it to my collection after I got my iPod Photo. It worked great and I've had no issues whatsoever with it in terms of the iPod or the album art transfer.

The only issue I did have, which I blame Windows Media Player for was screwing up my album art in my iTunes library... Seems that Windows Media Player wanted to go through my library behind my back (while it was running to play streamed content from a web site) and "update" all my album art, stripping it out of the MP3s and downloading it into JPG files instead.

[Parrothead Phan]

I don't have any album art loaded in my ID3 tags, but if I want to add it, how do I go back & find it, as you have done??

[jhollington]

I used a utility called iTunes Art Importer, which you can find at http://www.yvg.com/itunesartimporter.shtml

It basically integrates with iTunes somewhat, in that it will search for album art (using Amazon.com) for the currently selected albums. You can then pick which album art matches your album (sometimes it will find several), and import it into your albums with the press of a button.

Alternatively, you can just to to Amazon.com yourself, search for the albums, and drag-and-drop the album art into iTunes, but it's a bit more of a manual process that way.

[Parrothead Phan]

cool...thanks! :D

[lairc]

I've had this problem with some of my songs on my 60GB. It was weird, while all the songs in an album showed album art in iTunes, they all didn't on the iPod.

I was able to fix it by selecting the whole album or just the affected songs, right clicking, select Get Info. Then hit OK.

Somehow this was just enough for the iPod to think it needed to resync those songs that didn't have album art. Worked perfectly.

[profbobo]

Originally posted by lairc
I've had this problem with some of my songs on my 60GB. It was weird, while all the songs in an album showed album art in iTunes, they all didn't on the iPod.

I was able to fix it by selecting the whole album or just the affected songs, right clicking, select Get Info. Then hit OK.

Somehow this was just enough for the iPod to think it needed to resync those songs that didn't have album art. Worked perfectly.
That's how mine was. Were the affected songs cut off by about seven seconds as well? They played fine in iTunes, but not through the iPod.

[lairc]

Yes, some songs were like that. Others played through the whole duration, just without album art. Editing them in iTunes fixed that problem also.

[gmu599]

Mine has been doing that, but it just shows a blank box. I have the 40GB model and I swear I'm ready to throw it out the window. What is Apple's return policy? I bought it from apple.com about 45 days ago.

[monkeydog2k]

I have been experiencing the same peculiar behavior. I have not yet noticed my songs being shortened, but I am experiencing Album Art missing from Songs that I have manually added art to. I upgraded from a 3rg Gen 40 to a Photo 60 yesterday, and this is the more annoying problem that I have encountered with the new one. I will try to view the properties of the file and then resync to see if the problem has been fixed when I get home. All in all, I am still glad I upgraded, though.

[Mike E Boi]

I had a similar problem. The 2nd time I sync'ed w/ itunes all the album art from the initial population was lost. I wiped the iPod clean and re-sync'ed. I have not seen that prob since. I get the album art delay sometimes, but only for a second or two.

[thepeltman]

I just bought my first ipod. I havent even opened it yet. But I have a question i hope someone can help with.. My computer had a worm that I think caused this, somehow when i went to the folder with all of my mp3's. they were all gone. and so i restarted my computer and then my computer starting running ckdsk looking for all of "the music" and fixing corrupted files.. after restarting a few times.. my music was suddenly back. not all of it. but about 75 percent of it. But all of the Album art is now out in the main folder bunched together like a bunch of jpeg files.. How do i get all of that album art back where it came from? Should I just delete it all? Can i download album art for them again if they are missing. or is that to complicated. I wanted to fix this problem before putting any music on my ipod. I heard someone say once that I should just delete the album art anyway, because it takes up alot of room on the ipod. is this true to? thanks for any responses.

[imtigger2]

Let me see if this helps.... I use MusicMatch (WinXP) for my library and album art, then just use iTunes for sync to the iPod.

One time when in iTunes, I did the 'ol drag n drop for artwork on a song then I noticed that right above the artwork, where it says "selected song" there was a little right arrow. Clicking on it gave me a blank page, then my artwork. So in the right column (the music list) I right-clicked on the song and clicked on "get info".

In the "Album Art" tab, I saw that there was a blank page, and my artwork page. I deleted the blank page and no longer had problems with the artwork for that song.

I experimented and added 3 different album covers to one song and all three pieces of artwork were tagged to that one song. I'm not sure which one would play in the ipod, but I'm sure it would probably confuse it... or at least show only the first one, blank page or not. So again, I right-click on the song, went to get info, then album art and deleted the blank page and two pieces of album art I didn't need and now that song uses the correct album art.

Give it a shot and let me know if it works for you.

Dan B
imtigger :)

[imtigger2]

thepeltman... album art takes up very little space. I have one MP3 file that is 2.1 MB without artwork, and 2.3MB with. Not much of a difference. It varies, but I personally think it's worth having the artwork.

Oh... one little thing that took me a few button pushes to figure out finally. While a song with album art is playing, you can push the middle button to show the art full-screen for a little while.

Most of you knew that already tho', didn't you. :)

Dan B
imtigger

[imtigger2]

ya know what... just to add to what I noted above about there being "blank" artwork for some songs.

I just noticed that 'some' of my songs will show the "drag artwork here" wording in the artwork box, and some of my songs have just a blank box. It appears that the songs with the blank box actually have "blank" artwork attached to them. I don't know if this is because of MusicMatch or iTunes or whatever, but I have a LOT of deleting to do.

Here's a pointer... click on your song that doesn't have artwork. If you see the words "drag album artwork here", then do just that. If it's a blank page, right-click on the song, click on get info, click on the album art tab and DELETE the blank album art (IF the 'delete' button is available and you don't see anything there, just use it! There is something there and it needs to be deleted).

Hope this helps some of you.

Dan B
imtigger :)

[camster]

i would use iArt at www.ipodsoft.com instead of finding all of the art manually. just a tip

[imtigger2]

That looks cool... I'll have to try it. I have a lot of success with MusicMatch. It will do all my albums automatically and I just have to confirm each one, or choose from other albums (as you know, most songs are on multiple albums, greatest hits, live albums, etc..) and I can also fix tags.

F.Y.I.... here's what I use:

Moodlogic: fixes really messy song titles (file names) and MP3 tags and will make artist/song folders automatically and arrange everything nice and neat.

MusicMatch: will fix song tags and add album art from their database, not from Amazon (which at times has watermarks and weird labels on their album covers).

iTunes: I'll first start iTunes and "sync" it with my music folder (which is maintained by MusicMatch), then dock my iPod and let it update.

Either way... what works for one person might not work for another. Thanks for the tip on iArt, looks cool!

Dan B
imtigger

[aguilbeau]

Ok everyone. The very first post of this thread posed a problem that i and others here are having but noone seems to have the answer:

My album art shows in iTunes but in my iPod it doesn't always show up! For example on my iPod, some tracks on an album show the album art, some do not. i plug my ipod in to check if those tracks have album art associated with them and they do! (only one art associated with the file)

I'm finding that about half of my tracks are not displaying album art.

I can TEMPORARILY get a particular track to show the ablum art if i select it in iTunes look at it's properties then click ok. it will then show in my ipod. In theory, i'd have to do this for each and every track just to view them all. But it isn't supposed to work like that!

does anyone have a solution? Is this something i'll have to send back under its warrenty?

Help, i've been struggling with this for a month!

[imtigger2]

Originally posted by aguilbeau
Ok everyone. The very first post of this thread posed a problem that i and others here are having but noone seems to have the answer:

Help, i've been struggling with this for a month!


Did you try my suggestion listed a week ago? Just curious. I had the same trouble and found that these songs I was having trouble with, had a BLANK album cover, and one normal album cover. In fact, I found a couple songs with 2 or 3 album covers. You just need to delete the blank cover or additional covers, that's all. It's a problem with the tag on the MP3 file, not iTunes or iPod. (my opinion of course)

If you didn't see it, please go back and check it out and see if my solution/suggestion to the problem, works for you. I've pasted the post below.....

Dan B
imtigger2

----------------
previous post
----------------

One time when in iTunes, I did the 'ol drag n drop for artwork on a song then I noticed that right above the artwork, where it says "selected song" there was a little right arrow. Clicking on it gave me a blank page, then my artwork. So in the right column (the music list) I right-clicked on the song and clicked on "get info".

In the "Album Art" tab, I saw that there was a blank page, and my artwork page. I deleted the blank page and no longer had problems with the artwork for that song.

I experimented and added 3 different album covers to one song and all three pieces of artwork were tagged to that one song. I'm not sure which one would play in the ipod, but I'm sure it would probably confuse it... or at least show only the first one, blank page or not. So again, I right-click on the song, went to get info, then album art and deleted the blank page and two pieces of album art I didn't need and now that song uses the correct album art.
------------
PLEASE NOTE: if the artwork 'corner' in iTunes does not show the words "...drop artwork here", then you may have a blank artwork page in there that needs to be deleted. If you right-click on "properties" for that song, and on the cover art page the 'delete' key is highlighted... just click it! It will delete the blank page and when you're done with that, THEN you'll see the words "... drop artwork here". Problem fixed (hopefully). :)

[monkeydog2k]

Thanks for the advice, imtigger2, but i am afraid it did not apply to my issues.

I have a Mac and have only used iTunes to add my album art.

After experiencing missing artwork issues, I have been viewing each problem song's file properties in iTunes and it generally fixes the problem after a resync. Sometimes, i will even view the properties of every song on the album, just to be sure. Only once did i find a song that had more than one album art associated with it. I have not found any blanks, yet, but I will keep looking.

I have owned a 20 gig and a 40 gig prior to my 60 photo, and I must say that I have not experienced the oddities and bugginess that I find with my Photo on any previous model.

Just this afternoon, while driving down a rather smooth bit of highway, I noticed that my songs all started to skip, as though i were listening on a CD player with no skip protection. Every song was doing this, but if i replayed the songs, the skips were in different areas, leading me to believe it was a problem with the ipod's skip protection, but even pausing it for a little while would not help. It would even do this while i was sitting still at a red light after getting off the highway. I reset the iPod and the problem was solved.

Three days ago, while scrolling through pictures in the "thumbnail view", it locked up and I could not get it to scroll or select. All of the thumbnails became question mark symbols. Reset fixed it again.

The number of "reboots" I am having to do with this thing would make Bill Gates proud.

I think I will try to reformat it tonight and see if that helps with any or all of these types of issues.

I sure hope they are working on firmware for this thing. While I still love my iPod, I sure miss the days when I had trouble free use and my wallet was a little thicker...

I apologize for the long post. I am in a rambling mood, I guess.

[Bakerman]

It sounds as if these problems are limited to those using Windows. I have not seen a post about this from any user on a Mac yet. Am I reading this correctly?

[Sun Chemical]

Hi, longtime reader...owner of two iPods (20GB 4G and a 60GB Photo).

I have just experienced the missing album art issue. The same symptoms as previous posted: iTunes clearly shows the art (only one non-blank image per track), the iPod through iTunes clearly shows the art, but the iPod on its own refuses to display the art.
My symptoms are unrecoverable so far. I have yet to re-format since I so not want to re-synch another 48GB of music on a 5 day old iPod.

All of my tracks that were loaded onto the iPod when I first got it will display the art perfectly, however any album that I rip (using iTunes or EAC) now and then synch, or manually add, refuses to display the art. No amount of resetting or deleting or viewing properties will get it to display the album art on these new tracks. $600 - this is completely unacceptable.

Any suggestions?

[imtigger2]

Sorry... just trying to help.

My suggestion? 1st try to re-format it (rerun the setup software... which of course will erase everything), then re-load all your music. That sometimes helps with most problems.

Then, if that doesn't work, return it and get a new pod. You paid good money for it, you deserve a better running iPod.

Personally, any defective products are the BIGGEST peave of mine. These manufacturers crank out products so frickin' fast you wonder sometimes how the hell they could possibly handle quality control and testing. So, they use us consumers to do the testing for them. In these cases I think the manufacturer's should give us a new item AND a big discount for our wasted time, gas and effort it takes to replace something like that.

Take care...

Dan B
imtigger

[Sun Chemical]

Hmmm...

I am beginning to lean towards blaming iTunes' autosynch as the culprit to this bug. After putting my iPod into manual mode, I deleted the three albums that I was having art problems with, ejected the iPod, closed and re-opened iTunes. I put it back into autosynch mode and it loaded those deleted albums. I ejected the iPod, scrolled to the albums and the art showed up. Great!
I get to work this morning and NO OTHER ARTWORK will display other than the three that were giving me an issue yesterday. So now, it's the complete opposite of the spectrum. Artwork that showed up just fine yesterday is not displaying today.
So, I'll begrudgingly reformat tonight, spend another couple of hours reloading the tracks with autosynch, rip a few more CDs after the initial reload and see if the art bug still persists. If it does, back it goes to the store.

Thanks, Apple! I appreciate spending money to be a beta tester.

[monkeydog2k]

imtigger2, thanks for trying to help, though. I am truly sorry if I came across negatively. I certainly did not mean to. Sometimes the frustration of the moment just seeps through. I agree about taking it back though, if nothing is fixed soon.

Bakerman, I am using an iMac and am having the album art display problem (among other slideshow oddities) on my iPod 60.

I did not have time to format my pod last night, so I can't say I have had anything change. Of the 12 songs I listened to on my way into work this morning, three did not have artwork displayed, yet they are there in iTunes.

[Sun Chemical]

Ok...I think I have solved the problem. Bear with my wordiness...

For some inexplicable reason (and no, not user error) the check box for "Display Album Artwork" was unchecked. I noticed this last night when I was trying to figure out why the original three albums refused to show their art. I re-checked the box and iTunes froze when I attempted to update the iPod. C+A+D ended iTunes and freed up the iPod. I went back into iTunes and, as I stated previously, re-synched. The three problem albums updated, I ejected the iPod, checked the albums, and they were good to go. I didn't think to check any other album since it was working fine earlier - nice surprise for me when I got to work only to discover that no album would display art except for the three problem albums from the previous day.

When I got home, I synched up the iPod, went into the options and wanted to test something. The album art box was checked, so I unchecked it, applied, updated the iPod, and then went back into the options to re-check the box. Upon updating the iPod, a new display message flashed across the top of iTunes' display: "Optimizing Album Artwork". It would flash that for a second and then display a progress bar - a progress bar that after ten minutes barely moved 10% across the screen. I assumed that it was going track by track and "re-applying" the album art. After another minute or two, an error message popped up stating that the iPod could not be updated. At this point, iTunes and the iPod were frozen. C+A+D again, and looked into the task manager to discover that iTunes had blown out all of my memory (512MB / XP Pro SP2). Obviously, a memory leak.

I re-booted the system to clear everything out. Opened iTunes and re-synched the iPod. After clicking update, it did not display the "Optimizing..." sign, but went to the iPod is updated message almost immediately. Hmmm...if it errored out at about 10% optimizing, there was no way it "re-applied" all of the album art. So, I ejected the iPod and scrolled through the albums. All of my artists up to the middle of the "B"s were now showing the art. None after would display it.

I re-synched it once again and went into the options. The "Photo" tab and the "Display Album Art" check box were gone. Nothing. Vanished. So, now iTunes does not think a Photo iPod was connecting, which is why it wouldn't continue with the optimization of the album art. Great.

I tried to update it with the iPod updater. No go. It stated the iPod was up-to-date (vers. 1.0) and showed the Photo iPod icon, so it knew there was a Photo iPod connected.

So...my only recourse was to format.

And that is where I am at this moment. Re-synching 7200+ tracks for the next few hours. :/

Long-story short:
It appears that if the "Display Album Art" box is ever unchecked and the iPod is updated, it immediately removes the art. Checking the box again over a massive library will cause iTunes to "Optimize Album Art" while generating a large memory leak leading to iTunes freezing or a system failure. This then leads iTunes into "freaking out" with the Photo iPod where it refuses to recognize it as the Photo version.

There definitely needs to be some re-tooling in the software.

So, kids. Whatever you do, never touch that little check box. If you are unlucky enough to have it uncheck itself (as I was), well...good luck.

[monkeydog2k]

Sheesh, Sun Chemical, sounds like that iPod is lucky you did not throw it out the window. Man, what a horrible experience. I can say I have not had that much trouble yet (knock on wood).

[monkeydog2k]

Well, after a format and reload of my iPod via the updater on my Mac, I can say that the problem involving artwork is still there. I do not think that I am having as many come up without artwork as before (3 out of 40 songs tried), but that could be just the Luck of the Draw, so to speak.

As before, reviewing the properties or clearing the artwork out and dragging the artwork onto the file again seems to make the problem stop for that particular song.

[monkeydog2k]

Well, now I am either on to something, or I have just made things worse. Dunno. After reformatting and then re-syncing, I continued to experience the same problem. After doing some more searching on Apple's website, I found the following article:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?13@587.heo5ausOHLQ.3@.68a236c7/3

After turning off the Album Art Display function on my iPod and turning it back on, I get a status bar that states it is optimizing Album Artwork. I think to myself, this sounds promising, but of course this is not the case. It gets 3/4 done and then quits with the following error:

the iPod "iPod Photo" cannot be updated. An unknown error occured (-8969)

As of now, it seems more of my artwork does not display than before. The only thing I can think to do is redo the artwork as I find it does not work. This is going to be alot of work as i have about 8.5 thousand songs, so I am guessing roughly 1/4 of that will not have artwork on them now. The artwork is in iTunes, so it should not be too hard to redo the properties of the file, but I am afraid there may be some deeper problem here.

Any ideas would be helpful.

Thanks

[monkeydog2k]

Ok, this should be the last update on this for a while. Sorry about all the posts.

I just got off the phone with Apple Support and the end result is that I still have the problem, however, the good news is that they have confirmed that their Engineers have been aware of the problem for a while and are in the process of putting together a fix for it among other things.

No word as to when it will be available, but the important thing is that it has been confirmed that this is an official problem, and not just a few of us having an unexplained issue.

Of course, some may laugh and say this is just a standard line tech support will tell people to get them off their back, but I talked with them quite a while about it and their reply definitely sounded genuine.

Remember, you are not alone in this and it sounds like they will do whatever they can to resolve this issue.

[Sun Chemical]

Sounds exactly like my issue with that check box. I was lucky with re-formatting - the art is now back on all of my tracks...as long as that box doesn't uncheck itself.

I cannot understand Apple's thinking sometimes. Unchecking the box should tell the iPod to not display art. Checking it should tell it to display the art, not re-load every track with optimizing the art. Why re-optimize? It was fine as part of the file.

[jhollington]

Originally posted by Sun Chemical
I cannot understand Apple's thinking sometimes. Unchecking the box should tell the iPod to not display art. Checking it should tell it to display the art, not re-load every track with optimizing the art. Why re-optimize? It was fine as part of the file.
It's important to understand that the iPod photo doesn't actually display the artwork that is embedded in the MP3/AAC file's tags, in the same way that it doesn't read those tags when generating it's album/artist/genre/etc listings. For the sake of simplicity and speed of access, all of this information lives in databases on the iPod.

Further, the iPod has no capability for dynamically resizing images. The "Optimizing Artwork" stage is actually iTunes resizing the album art into two thumbnail-sized images suitable for displaying on the iPod's screen (one small thumbnail for the default view with track info, and one version for the separate album art view). The photo library works in pretty much the same way.

When the "Display Album Artwork" button is unchecked, iTunes will remove the album artwork database on the next sync. While one could argue that it doesn't necessarily need to do this, it's trying to save space by cleaning up unnecessary files.

When you check/re-check the "Display Album Artwork" button, it's not actually reloading the music tracks, but rather rebuilding the album artwork databases.

If you put your iPod photo into disk mode, you can actually find the physical album artwork databases in the \iPod_Control\Artwork directory.

[Sun Chemical]

I didn't mean for it to sound like it re-loaded every track as a whole - just the art. Now I see that it was rebuilding the library database. That makes a bit more sense, but what I don't understand is why delete the database when the box is unchecked? Saving space does not seem like a good reason. These are 40/60GB players; if one was worried about space, one should not have art in the file in the first place. What could the file size possibly be? *EDIT* Found it - 320MB for the two thumb sizes combined. OUCH.

Also, why is it when I initially load the tracks onto the player, it loads the track and optimizes the art faster than when it just optimizes the art after re-checking the display box? As a generic comparison, loading a new track takes about 1 - 2 seconds and that includes the art process. After re-checking the display box, optimizing takes 15-30 seconds per track. o_O

Anywho, it's working fine now and I absolutely love it.

[gmu599]

Everything that you guys have described has happened to me. When I called Apple, I got this guy that was kinda rude and told me there is nothing that can be done. Nothing that can be done?! I shelled out a lot of dough for this...I want it to work right all the time!! Anyway, at least they are more aware of the problem and are working on fixing it.

[dethbunny]

I also had some issues getting art to show up. At first, it was silent errors, just not showing art on the iPod for tracks I knew had art embedded. After un-checking and checking the album art setting in iTunes, I started getting the unknown error -8969 when iTunes was doing the art upload.

I tried reformatting and re-loading the iPod entirely, (through the firmware update/restore app) but that didn't help at all.

It's good to know that it's a "known issue" but I'm still going to contact Apple about it - I want to make sure it's a widely-acknowledged issue.

On a side note, re-loading (Restore) the iPod renamed it to just "IPOD." That's obnoxious. I re-named it back to the old name through the WinXP drive manager, but "IPOD" still shows up in iTunes. Is there any way to totally re-run the iPod setup from scratch, where it asks you to give the iPod a name and all that?

[dethbunny]

OKay, I re-named the iPod through iTunes. For some reason I had gotten it in my head that that wouldn't work - but it did.

Also, got my artwork fixed after the "(-8969)" error. Apparently one whole album was corrupted, but...I'm moving this over to the main sticky-fied thread about this issue.

[The FD]

I have this same problem - but renaming my ipod, reformating it disabling the artwork and reapplying it doesn't seem to help. Does anyone have a work around - obviously this is 3 years later (nearly 4).