i’ve got past form on cover art issues. here’s another: only about 50% of the tracks synced to my iphone display cover art. this is weird as 100% of the files on the source macbook have embedded art.
background: moved my music from a 2014 imac to an m1max macbook pro. tried to use migration assistant which failed catastrophically, hosing the macbook’s operating system. rebuilt that and then transferred files manually before the final retirement of the imac. in the process of transferring my music collection, i turned off “automatically update artwork”, then manually added art to each and every file. (i’m unemployed and have time to kill.)
so that the files on the iphone missing artwork is mysterious.
what i’ve tried: restarting the music player doesn’t help. rebooting the phone doesn’t either. deleting all the tracks on the phone and re-syncing also doesn’t help. turning “automatically update artwork” back on did nothing.
wonder if it’s a similar issue to my previous run-in with iphone artwork. apple engineering actually solved that one. turned out the cache on the phone was corrupted. unfortunately i’ve misplaced the instructions to reset that cache.
The brute-force method is to connect a USB cable, uncheck the “Sync Music” box and click Sync. This will delete all music from the phone. Then re-check the box and Sync again, which will cause it to transfer everything from your computer to the phone.
Needless to say, do not do this if you don’t have all your music on the connected computer!
I suffer from the exact same issue. Despite my Macs showing correct cover art, my iPhone will at times display either nothing or the completely wrong cover art. I have not yet heard of any clear path to a solution that does not involve basically re-ripping or re-syncing or any other kind of tedious manual fix.
went trolling through my email to see if the method for clearing the album cover art on the phone was written down anywhere but nope. the support agent walked me through the process and i didn’t write it down. who knew that it’d be needed again (maybe)?
i’ve got a support ticket open and a senior advisor personally looking into this issue for me.
they found the brute method for clearing the artwork cache. tried it. twice. didn’t work. so it’s probably not an artwork cache issue like the wrong artwork was.
also tried another phone (1st gen se) to see if it had the same problem. it hasn’t enough disk to hold the same number of files (or even close) as my iphone13, so the results were inconclusive.
given this problem surfaced after migrating to the macbook from my imac, i still suspect it’s something macos is doing during sync. but we’ll have to see what apple engineering comes back with.
just got off the phone with apple support. apparently the missing artwork is a known issue and a fix will be available in a future ios update. when is unknown. but given they didn’t ask me for any data from my phone, they may already have a handle on its cause.
the support advisor did say that some customers complaining about this issue were resolved with the process for clearing the artwork cache i posted above. @Simon, maybe that’ll fix your phone? hope so.
Thanks for that, but that cache removal process is super tedious (not to mention really lengthy with 60GB of music and Lightning still forcing USB2 on us ). And TBH I’m not convinced they really know this is the culprit. Reminds me a bit of the “reboot Windows” or “fix permissions” suggestions form back in the day.
For now I think I’ll wait to see if they indeed release a fix. I’ve seen so many complaints about this issue (and about equally as many suggestions for “fixes”), they must be aware something’s amiss. Now obviously they really only care about selling their streaming, but with such a large installed user base relying on synced music people actually own, I doubt they can just ignore the elephant in the room. My gut says I’m underestimating their brazenness, but you always have to try to stay optimistic.
an interesting variation on the ios artless nit: created a playlist to use for auditioning a loudspeaker. note that the zeppelin v cover is shown on the playlist overview but is missing from the track “when the levee breaks”. same thing for larks tongue in aspic; shown in the overview, missing from the eponymous track.
). And TBH I’m not convinced they really know this is the culprit. Reminds me a bit of the “reboot Windows” or “fix permissions” suggestions form back in the day.
