To Clarify: iTunes 7 ALBUM ARTWORK Issues...

[HiHoSilver]

Originally Posted by jhollington

Are you playing these tracks through iTunes from your local hard drive or from your iPod?

Just playing them from my local hard drive ... my iPod is not connected

Originally Posted by jhollington

Are the files with the missing artwork those which you manually added, or tracks with automatically-added artwork?

It actually appears that the tracks with missing artwork are those that I manually added myself. I did not do anything differently with those that came up missing though - compared to all the artwork that I manually added that never disappeared ... just use drag & drop directly into the artwork box in the lower-left corner while the track is playing.

Thanks for the help.

[Rhysy]

One issue I have is using artwork for compilation albums.
When using coverbrowser, an album with a single artist will display only one image, however, when compilation albums (with various artists) are viewed in the coverbrowser, the same artwork image appears once for each track. Is there a way to make the artwork appear one time for each album and not for each artist?

[Jesse Hollington]

Hi and welcome to iLounge.

For this to work you have to have the tracks themselves set as "Part of a Compilation" (in each track) and have "Group Compilations when browsing" turned on in your iTunes preferences. This should cause all tracks that are part of the same compilation to be grouped together.

Another alternative is to set the same "Album Artist" for all tracks. This may be less viable for an album with a lot of different artists, but is usually a preferable solution if there's a primary artist and a few tracks by featured artists.

[Rhysy]

Originally Posted by jhollington

Hi and welcome to iLounge.

For this to work you have to have the tracks themselves set as "Part of a Compilation" (in each track) and have "Group Compilations when browsing" turned on in your iTunes preferences. This should cause all tracks that are part of the same compilation to be grouped together.

Another alternative is to set the same "Album Artist" for all tracks. This may be less viable for an album with a lot of different artists, but is usually a preferable solution if there's a primary artist and a few tracks by featured artists.

Brilliant. Thanks for the help and the swift response!

[silvery]

Originally Posted by jhollington

[*]Select all the tracks and choose File->Get Info and set them as "Part of a Compilation" This will organize them into a separate "Compilations" artist heading, but will group them together. This is most appropriate for mix albums where every artist is different and there is no single album artist.[*]For albums with featured artists, but still one single primary artist, you're best to just set the "Album Artist" field to the primary artist (again, select all tracks and choose File->Get Info to make this change). Specifying an "Album Artist" will override the normal Album + Artist matching.[/list]Either of the above should group all of your tracks from a given album together. For more info, I'd recommend checking out Apple's Knowledgebase article on the subject: Why aren't songs with the same album art grouped together?

Jesse, once again thanks for a great thread with valuable information. I can't thank you enough for the above info. I knew I should be doing that already since most of my music consists of compilations, but this forces me to do it.

[Kensuke NOL]

If you are in manual mode, the ONLY way to put artwork back onto your iPod right now is to add the artwork to the song in iTunes and then re-transfer those tracks back to your iPod. The artwork can be added either manually or automatically, but it must be added to the file in iTunes and then the file transferred to the iPod.

Using the Manual option, how exactly can I do that? Just go to the iTunes folder where the mp3 is and drag and drop is back to my iPOD or what?

[Jesse Hollington]

Basically, yes.

More specifically, you would go to the location of the file in iTunes (not on the iPod, but in the iTunes music library), and drag the file from there to your iPod, the same way that you would normally put a new song onto your iPod.

(Note that previous versions of iTunes seemed to allow drag-and-drop directly from Windows Explorer onto the iPod in iTunes. As far as I can tell, this was never officially supported by Apple, and doesn't work in iTunes 7 -- the music has to be in the iTunes library first, and then dragged from there onto the iPod).

[Kensuke NOL]

Thank you very much for the quick response!

I just tried the drag and drop from the iTunes folder method for one of my mp3s, but the artwork still doesn't show. I did this a few times with no luck, kept deleting and adding the artwork to the mp3 in the iTunes library.

[RGX A2]

I can't seem to find a response relevant to my problem. I just noticed this problem recently after downloading the newest iTunes verision. I changed the artwork on a certain song manually as i always have and it seemed to work fine. Later that day i was listening to that same song through headphones and noticed there was no artwork being displayed. But it displays on my computer when the ipod is plugged in? I further investigated this and found it to be the same for all of the songs that i have tried to add artwork for after this new update. It's not a big deal but kind of annoying. Any ideas?

[Kensuke NOL]

It's the same problem everyone else here is having, dude.

[RGX A2]

Actually no. The problem i see most is that people are actually losing artowrk. I didn't lose any artwork. I just can't add new artwork to old files. If I place a mp3 file in the library and add artwork to it there, then transfer it to the ipod it works. It doesn't work the way it used to as far as adding artwork to mp3s already on the ipod. (i read that someone said it works the same was as it did before which is not true). I don't need your ######## responses "dude".....i just want to know if anyone knows any way around this.

[Kensuke NOL]

Haha, I for one am not losing artwork. I can't even add any new artwork or even show any of the old ones myself on the little thing manually.

As I actually read, not a whole lot of people are "losing artwork". They just can't see it on their iPOD, which is a problem you are having yourself? If you really did read through, you'd know this.

So chill out a little bit, help will arrive for you soon.

[dmorand]

So is there no way to display the artwork that's embedded in your mp3's using iTunes? It was displaying fine for me, then a few songs weren't displaying so I loaded up iTunes and unchecked the display artwork, then I rechecked it and it updated the iPod. Now I can't see any artwork.

Is there a fix on it's way for this, or do people know a good workaround? This thread seems to outline many different solutions.

[croutonboy]

I have the exact same problem and situation as dmorand, having also unchecked and rechecked the displayed album art to find ALL art that was previously there (except a handful which I had updated using 7.0's "get album art" feature) is no longer showing on the ipod

There must be a script or workaround of some sort that can be used. Simply "reloading your music" is not an acceptable alternative, as I have a completely full 60 MB ipod being manually synchronized because I have much more music on my computer. Recreating it all would be time-consuming and probably lead to divorce.

Can anyone suggest a fix for this?

[Jesse Hollington]

Hi and welcome to iLounge.

Unfortunately, there is presently no workaround, since the artwork is only converted and stored in the database during transfer to the iPod. Therefore, for the artwork to be converted, the song has to be retransferred.

As an aside, however, you don't need to use manual mode just because you have more music on y our computer than will fit on your iPod. Try setting up automatic sync of selected playlists, and then put the songs you want to sync into those playlists. It will have pretty much the same effect of manual synchronization (just put things in the playlist as you want them to be synced), and provide all the benefits of automatic synchronization (including the ability to completely load your iPod when problems like this occur).