Stopped Adding Album Artwork

[blueboy714]

iTunes stopped adding when I'm adding in my own CDs. It worked fine for years.

I still use v10.7 for Windows because I never liked v11 and I haven't seen anything about v12 yet.

I've got a huge library (25,000 songs) so that may be part of the problem.

I'm not sure if finally biting the bullet and downloading v12 will do the trick, but I'd like to know if v12 for Windows is stable and I can trust it fix my problems.

Advice appreciated.

 

[cjmnews]

There can be many issues at work here.

Can you access the iTunes Store with v10.7? If not, that is the cause. The iTunes store is where the artwork comes from.

Assuming you can reach the iTunes Store with v10.7, do you see the same tracks that you have loaded that are missing artwork in the iTunes Store? If not, this is the cause. They can only add artwork for tracks that they already have.

Assuming that you have tracks that are in the iTunes Store that are missing artwork, do you have the same Artist, Album, and Genre tags on it as they have in the iTunes Store? If not, this is the cause. The Automatic Artwork process requires that these 3 tags be identical to get a match.

Finally, do you leave iTunes and your computer running for long periods of time? If not, then this could be the cause combined with the above issues. iTunes needs the time to download the artwork. So it needs to be running for a while. 25,000 tracks is a lot. Maybe try leaving it up overnight a few nights and see if that helps. I would make a smart playlist that captures all the tracks that don't have artwork and check in the morning to see if the count goes down over night.

v12 kind of sucks compared to v10. But you get used to it. It does everything v10 did, but in an illogical manner. Finding the obscure stuff is hard. Three view alterations to get it to look like v10, ugh. Everyone I know complains about it.

 

[blueboy714]

I meet all of those "assumptions" - the album artwork just up and stopped and working one day. When I try to download artwork from recent releases I get an message saying it's unavailable, but it's one of the Apple Store's top sellers.

I'm going to be near an Apple Store in the next few weeks so I'll have to stop and see what v12 looks like. v10 worked perfectly and I only use iPods - unlike most people - so I don't need to keep upgrading to inferior versions just because they have iPhone or iPod capabilities or fixes.

Thanks for the quick reply

 

[cjmnews]

It is also possible that they changed the get artwork API that disables v10.7 from working anymore.

I personally don't use that service anymore. The artwork they were provided a few years ago was too low quality for me. So I just look for the art on other sites and add it manually.

Manual art work embeds the art work into the file. This way if I quit using iTunes and move my music elsewhere, I still have the artwork inside of the file.

 

[blueboy714]

Update on the problem I had that seems to have fixed itself - I went into Preferences and unchecked the "Automatically retrieve track names" and "Automatically download missing artwork". The next time I went into iTunes it asked me I wanted to turn these on and said yes. A few days later everything worked fine.

Go figure.