Itunes cover art - back and forth

[kidpocono]

Same art problem, whether iTunes 9.2 or 9.1

I am glad that others have the same experience that I do, I suppose. I have been ripping Apple Lossless files for a few months on a G5 Quad running 10.5 and iTunes 9.1.

Going through albums in an alpha sort, I have painstakingly added artwork to each. I'm about a third through the collection. I understood that the music file would have metadata changed to reflect the artwork, along with title/artist and other info, so that if it was used on another computer, the file would retain the info. When I backed up my music files on a separate drive and imported that drive into iTunes 9.2 on another Mac, though, only some of the artwork came through. I also checked in Finder on both Macs to see if the Get Info would show the art; it does not.

The art still shows in iTunes using 9.1, so it seems to me that despite my understanding that there is not a file in the application for "Art" (unless maybe for what one downloads from the iTunes Store), somehow the info is
remembered independent of the application? I also seem to recall that when upgrading to 9.2 on the one Mac, there was an option after it was installed about using "thumbnails" or something to that effect.

Any suggestions on what I may be missing? I would like to not have to paste in the album art again (also, might it make a difference in the iTunes "Get Info" section for songs whether one drops the artwork into the Info window or the Artwork window?).

Thanks for any help,
Paul

 

[ntrigue]

CoverScout 3

I really like the software. May be around $25 now. I've used it on 64,000 songs and it's awesome.

 

[SR500]

iTunes 9.2 broke album artwork + thumbnails

I am glad that others have the same experience that I do, I suppose.

I'm experiencing the same problems on several MacBookPro models (running 10.5.8, 10.6.3, 10.6.4) and on a G5 Quad running 10.4.11 and iTunes 9.2. Songs that are inside the iTunes Library folder structure still display the artwork thumbs in Finder but once copied (regardless how I do it) to the desktop the artwork disappears and the generic icon shows up. This definitely started with iTunes 9.2 ...!

Also, in iTunes 9.2 Apple changed the way artwork is stored: up to 9.1.1 you could just drag and drop a clip, jpg, png onto the artwork preview on the left and it got stored inside the mp3, m4a etc. Same effect if you did a "Get Info" on one or more files and dragged or pasted artwork into either the separate artwork window or the little artwork pane in the Info section.

Apple changed the handling of artwork in iTunes 9.2 supposedly to speed up the display of album art in Cover Flow view. I found the increase in speed to be just minimal but the trouble incurred by the changes are a royal PITA ...!

Note that simply going back to iTunes 9.1.1 doesn't fix this! You'll get back the proper behavior only if you have a complete backup of the system that you can restore. I even tried reinstalling 9.1.1 and recreating all the library files and deleted the cover art cache (since my album artwork is always embedded in the songs).

That wreaked MAJOR HAVOC on my system: all of a sudden the Cover Flow window of iTunes that was only to be displayed in Space 1 (out of 4 Spaces) popped up in every other Space overwriting the screen e.g. in Mail (Space 4) and Safari (Space 3) with the Cover Flow display from Space 1 every time a new song started playing and the album changed. I tried to fix this by reinstalling iTunes, Spaces.app, the latest ComboUpdater –– all to no avail!

Only wiping the whole mess clean and reinstalling from a recent backup fixed this ugly mess. I'd like to see iTunes 9.2.1 fixing this but I really don't have much hope. This will be the new de-facto standard of how iTunes does cover art –– and IT SUCKS BIG TIME!

ADDENDUM: I just jumped the gun and installed iTunes 9.2.1 on a fresh MacOS X 10.6.4 installation –– and BUMMER! As expected, display of artwork thumbs in Finder is still broken, as well as the process of embedding artwork into the song files. Only thing I immediately saw that has been fixed is the display of the album art in the Cover Flow window: in iTunes 9.2 it showed up kinda washed-out (the tonal distribution was off) when compared to the original artwork file *and* to the small artwork preview pane on the left –– that at least was fixed. I DON'T LIKE IT HOW OSX SLOWLY DEVOLVES INTO JUST ANOTHER WINDOWS!