Adding Album Art in iTunes Corrupted Some AAC Files

[AlphaVoyager]

Hi Everyone,

I have encountered a problem in iTunes in which a few random aac files will become corrupted when I add album art to them. I am utterly baffled as to why this would happen.

Here are the stats:

• I am using an 21 inch iMac (with Intel Core 2 duo); it was bought in April 2010.
• I am running Snow Leopard
• Based on the file dates, the corruption seemed to happen last summer when itunes was in version 9.2.1 (I hope I have that right; I've always updated, so my version should be whatever was the latest version back then).
• The affected files seem to be small / short aac files (under 1 megabyte, under 1 minute)
• The resulting corruption yielded a file which is blank for the second half and the album art comes out as a black box. The file is larger after the added art, but what is there seems corrupt. However, many other files in the same album play fine and the added artwork shows up uncorrupted.
• I added the album art "by hand": I downloaded the cover from Amazon, then I used "select all" for the album files, and finally I dragged and dropped the jpg into the album art window.

So, does anyone have any ideas about what might have happened? I'm anxious to find out so that I may avoid future corruption but also figure out what other files to check in order to ensure that no other files have been corrupted. The problem is especially vexing because I have a huge music library and I have been working for the past year to get my album art really in shape. But, if itunes has been corrupting some of my files, it may require me to do something drastic (like play my whole library!) in order to ensure that no other files were corrupted by adding album art.

Since these files are reasonably small, I have attached both of them (the original and the corrupted file) and the art file as a zip file.

P.S. I have been a long time lurker, but this is my first post.

 

[AlphaVoyager]

Sorry to bump my own thread, but I wanted to alert readers that others seem to have run into the same glitch over on Apple's official forums:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12010756

And:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=13354597

I have at least found that it is possible to see which files have gone awry simply by looking in each folder. I have attached an example and you can see right away which files were broken by adding art. They have a black box rather than a mini version of the album art.

 

[LadyJarhead]

Sorry to bump my own thread, but I wanted to alert readers that others seem to have run into the same glitch over on Apple's official forums:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12010756

And:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=13354597

I have at least found that it is possible to see which files have gone awry simply by looking in each folder. I have attached an example and you can see right away which files were broken by adding art. They have a black box rather than a mini version of the album art.

Hi AlphaVoyager .. I'm having similar problem. What steps did you take to display those folders with "BLACK" boxes. Thanks .. Lady Jarhead