Music app botches album artwork

[T Coma]

I recently imported all my music from iTunes on a 2011 High Sierra iMac to an M1 Monterey MBP, and while the music all came over, the artwork is a mess. I'd say about 50% of the album covers are correct, and the other half is split between no artwork and wrong artwork. Going individually, album by album, and right-clicking to "Get Album Artwork" has even worse results. Let's say it's 1/3 each of: correct artwork, correct artist but wrong album, no results. And these are not obscure albums, mind you. It got 4/9 Led Zeppelin albums correct, for example. Similar results from NIN, Meat Loaf, etc. Is there a faster fix?

 

[rhett7660]

Was any of the album art work tagged? I can't remember what iTunes uses for pulling meta data from the files to display artwork. It has been a while since I used it.

 

[TightLines]

Apple (junk) Music ain’t no iTunes… you will find it doesn’t do most things a music management tool such as iTunes did.

Apple - Give us back our iTunes!!

<<< IS NOT THIS JUNK OF AN APP >>>

 

[cardfan]

Apple (junk) Music ain’t no iTunes… you will find it doesn’t do most things a music management tool such as iTunes did.

Apple - Give us back our iTunes!!

View attachment 2084103 >> View attachment 2084104

iTunes was a robust program. Music is a play app for a phone OS that got ported over to mac.

But this is what people wanted. iTunes was too complicated for them.

 

[person s]

Music is a play app for a phone OS that got ported over to mac.

the interface with the iphone and ipad is very poor
for some reason I just can't get my purchased songs to show on my ipad mini 6 without copying them across - on the iphone they just appeared
I just got that U2 album from some years ago that no-one wanted

 

[TightLines]

iTunes was a robust program. Music is a play app for a phone OS that got ported over to mac.

But this is what people wanted. iTunes was too complicated for them.

I am sorry, but I disagree completely… there really was nothing complicated about iTunes and it managed digital assets well…. Not just music, but video, podcast, etc…. Apple Music was derived out of greed and Apples desire to try and manipulate its users into not owning their music by making it so convoluted in Apple Music most people just give up… not to leave without mention peoples other digital libraries… it functioned well as a management tool for all home entertainment assets and would have worked very well beautifully with the in-progress “front row” software Apple had introduced…

I don’t think Apples greed and their massive lowering of quality standards is what the people want… its all they have been offered. They have no choice… and it sucks big time!!

<<< IS NOT THIS JUNK OF AN APP >>>

 

[bhagemann]

YES! I've been dealing with the artwork issue for the past year. Same symptoms as the OP. At some point.. in maybe April/May an update seemed to have helped. And I could get the missing artwork to come back in to the iTunes library by scrolling thru with the Album view back and forth.. .eventually it seemed it'd 'go get it' from the file again (I DO have all the art embedded in the mp3s). In any case, now I'm on a Ventura beta and the artwork problem is back and I have to do the scrolling trick again. But it doesn't always work and is very time consuming.

But now with Music in Ventura there are new issues with airplay speakers, music not playing with a double click on a song title, tagging doesn't always take... I usually can use the app to listen to music for a while (as long as I don't try anything fancy) but eventually it stops playing and I have to REBOOT... not just restart Music. Maybe things like the airplay speakers and output selection being flakey are a system issue... dunno. Don't care really... just want it fixed or to know what to do to fix it myself.

I used to spend time here and there tagging my rather large library, adding artwork to albums missing it, changing genres etc. But now I don't want to do a damn thing because it's such a ******** of an app and I end up pulling out my hair when things are so broken. I want to start digitizing a bunch of vinyl here but can't get myself to start that project until some later date when this is at least functional.

SO FRUSTRATED...

 

[phrehdd]

I am sorry, but I disagree completely… there really was nothing complicated about iTunes and it managed digital assets well…. Not just music, but video, podcast, etc…. Apple Music was derived out of greed and Apples desire to try and manipulate its users into not owning their music by making it so convoluted in Apple Music most people just give up… not to leave without mention peoples other digital libraries… it functioned well as a management tool for all home entertainment assets and would have worked very well beautifully with the in-progress “front row” software Apple had introduced…

I don’t think Apples greed and their massive lowering of quality standards is what the people want… its all they have been offered. They have no choice… and it sucks big time!!

View attachment 2084129 <<< IS NOT THIS JUNK OF AN APP >>> View attachment 2084130

Apple Music is akin to the Kodak Instamatic cameras that were sold expressly for the purpose of getting people to buy Kodak film. The iTunes of years ago was at least easy to use and at times fun. Over time iTunes became more interested in the 'sale' for Apple of files and such. Though not perfect, about the time when iTunes had its "jukebox" view it was at least simple and did what most wanted. I'm looking into other music apps beyond Apple. - Audirvana, Swinsian and JRivers Media center. All of them work reasonably well but can play more file types and some offer truly nice additional features.

 

[Amazon Rainforest]

I recently imported all my music from iTunes on a 2011 High Sierra iMac to an M1 Monterey MBP, and while the music all came over, the artwork is a mess. I'd say about 50% of the album covers are correct, and the other half is split between no artwork and wrong artwork. Going individually, album by album, and right-clicking to "Get Album Artwork" has even worse results. Let's say it's 1/3 each of: correct artwork, correct artist but wrong album, no results. And these are not obscure albums, mind you. It got 4/9 Led Zeppelin albums correct, for example. Similar results from NIN, Meat Loaf, etc. Is there a faster fix?

I just saw this exact problem updating my iPhone 6S to a 14 Pro. All my music was copied from my 2016 MBP to the new phone. 384 albums imported, each with a cover that I manually set, resulting in a hundred or so with the wrong album covers. The covers were all there but I would see a Depeche Mode album with a Cheap Trick cover. I tried everything I could think of to fix the covers but nothing worked. I finally stumbled on a fix posted by someone with the same problem. Their solution was to (on the iPhone) delete the artist using Settings->Music->Downloaded Music then re-sync the phone with my Mac. It was a time-consuming (read: all day) process but it worked.

I know this doesn't help with your problem since yours is Mac->Mac but it demonstrates this problem exists elsewhere. And across different platforms. What I would suggest you do is discard your Music folder on your new Mac and manually copy the Music folder from your old machine to the same place on the new machine. Fire up iTunes (or Music or whatever the app is called) and see if it recognizes the old directory structure and its files. If that doesn't work, then copy the Music folder then try to import it.

On another note, the solution that I found for the iPhone was posted over two years ago. This means Apple hasn't done anything to resolve this problem. How typical. Their software is only a shadow of what it used to be. I have since reported the problem to Apple. If past history is any indication, nothing will be done about it. Thank you, Tim Cook.

 

[michael31986]

I been combining some albums together and putting the extra tracks on disc 2 of 2 but same album name. Mainly b sides and remixes.

But for some reason my iPhone will display the album art for the 2of2 disc tracks as the main cover when browsing in my library on my iPhone.

Any reason why it’s doing this for some and not others?

Why wouldn’t it display the album art of track one? Or even so the album art that is used for the majority of the tracks not a random single that I tacked on to the end.

 

[landshark2]

My story is similar, but my pressing issue is with syncing between my year old Mini and my month old iPhone.

I upgraded from a 1st gen SE to a 14 Pro, and I didn't look closely at the album artwork until after adding some CDs to my collection. The source computer for the SE is a mid 2012 MacBook Pro, and since it has a disk drive, I've been importing on that device, then AirDropping to the Mini. If the find artwork function doesn't find the proper artwork, I add the proper artwork. I have spent significant time on my collection because my music collections have always been sorted alphabetical (last name where necessary) chronological, and not very much of that transferred over to the Mini.

It's possible that after the transfer from SE to14 Pro the artwork was okay, but I couldn't find an easy way to transfer the music from the phone to the Mini. So I transferred the laptop collection to the Mini, then deleted the music on the phone and synced it with the Mini. That's where the process breaks down for me; I've fixed all the artwork on the Mini, but after syncing, the phone has the partially jumbled artwork we are all fuming about.

My initial searches for fixes brought up complaints about this issue going back at least to 2017; how in the world is this still an issue?

Someone above seems to be using beta Ventura, with no resolution. Is this really harder than rocket science?

 

[person s]

not sure whether I’ve mentioned this before but it’s still annoying
my iPad mini 6 doesn’t display any of my iTunes music purchases, and nothing I do seems to work
it’s a lot of downloading to do it manually
it did show the compulsory U2 album from a few years ago but I deleted that

 

[videojanitor]

Not sure if this is related but I also have an artwork issue. Specifically, I have many purchased songs where I replaced the provided artwork with custom art, such as a scan of the vinyl record label. I just noticed that Music (aka iTunes) on Ventura is showing the original artwork, and not the artwork I added. Looking at the M4A file in the Finder shows my custom artwork, but not when viewed in the Music app. Frustrating to say the least. Not clear if this just started with Ventura, as I just now noticed it.