Hello All - the Music apps on my computer (2019 MacBook Pro), and my phone (15 Pro Max), almost never show the correct album art, and often, no art at all. Cannot fix it by downloading art through the app. Computer and phone are on the latest OS. This has been going on for years, and while not ruining my life, it’s an irritation. Any ideas welcome!
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I’d like to know myself. Because it only works about half the time on Catalina. Often, I have to download the cover art separately then add the artwork to the album in Music. It’s a big PITA. And many times the album cover art bears no relation at all to the album it is applied to.
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I presume you’re talking about music you actually have downloaded, not streaming music via Apple Music—you can’t do anything about the artwork provided via streaming.
As for the music you actually possess, the only way I have found to avoid Music showing incorrect art is to turn off the settings option to “Automatically update artwork” (found in Preferences under Advanced in Music.app on macOS). It will require manually fixing the incorrect album art and re-syncing the tracks to your phone, but from then on, as long as this option remains off, your art should remain as whatever you put there. (iOS Music doesn’t itself update stored album art.)
I don’t know if this also keeps art from disappearing altogether. I’m still in the process of fixing art from when I last had “Automatically update artwork” on (years ago), and it can be complicated to tell if scattered individual tracks have lost their art, so I have insufficient data to work with on that problem. I’ve found that art doesn’t always sync correctly to my iPhone along with the music, though I don’t believe this is the only cause of missing art. Re-syncing usually takes care of it, but may lead to other tracks losing their art.
This is unquestionably a long-running problem. I don’t know where Apple gets their art from, but their source is horrible. Either the algorithm matching art, the tagging in the art database, or both is seriously flawed. I’ve found allmusic.com and discogs.com to be the most reliable sources of correct album art. I find AllMusic easier to navigate and better organized, but Discogs is more complete, so I try AllMusic first, then Discogs. If I can’t find the correct art through either of those sites (not uncommon with some of the bargain-bin classical discs I bought when I was in college), an image search on Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo usually will turn it up, if I’m persistent enough in tweaking search parameters. The image search is reliable only when I already know what the art should look like, of course.
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Thanks for this. Should have mentioned virtually all my music is burned from (licensed!) CDs. Apple buys its metadata from a company whose name I’ve forgotten. I know someone who used to be an engineer at the company. I once asked him why the metadata on Apple was so thin; why don’t we get the full album notes, and he told me that it’s all available but Apple won’t pay for it.
I also use allmusic and, especially discogs, a great resource to help me build my CD collection. Album art is easy to find in all sorts of ways, but, hey - why shouldn’t it work the way it used to?
If I recall correctly, Gracenote (orginally CDDB).
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I knew they bought metadata from Gracenote, but I didn’t know the artwork came from there too. If it does, either Apple doesn’t care enough to pay for album art that matches correctly, or the quality of Gracenote’s data has really gone downhill since they were CDDB.
I used to have hope that MusicBrainz would have a viable solution to automatically fixing metadata, but they haven’t really lived up to the promise. Of course, it doesn’t help that I have certain personal idiosyncrasies in how I want certain data represented that don’t appear to match how anybody else wants their metadata tagged. A large number of digital albums I’ve bought have needed manual editing to be consistent with the rest of my collection.
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I don’t know if it’s still the case, but CDDB was (largely?) crowdsourced metadata. Garbage In/Garbage Out.
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Offhand, I think CDDB may have relied on crowdsourced information early in its life but after it became more professional in mission and outlook—hence the change in name to Gracenote—it began licensing data. Sony’s acquistion of Gracenote probably streamlined the licensing process. Sony has a huge music business.
I don’t believe Gracenote is owned by Sony anymore. I don’t follow it closely but my recollection is Sony sold it to another big company who later sold it to a private equity firm (the current owner).
ETA: in a related vein, I think the media cataloging software Delicious Library (they’re top of mind at the moment because they were mentioned in another thread a couple of days ago) relied on Amazon’s product catalog for images and track listing.
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Coincidentally, the developer of Delicious Library (who now works at Apple, I believe) announced the withdrawal of the app from the App Store and from their site because Amazon apparently cut off the feed to the images without notice recently.
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It’s actually amazing it ever works at all.
Consider that when you rip a CD to iTunes Music, what you end up with is a set of tracks. It isn’t an album anymore, and doesn’t have the identifiers burned into the CD that allow that CD to be uniquely identified.
And it can’t use the other metadata. Let’s say you have a track named Hold On, with album title Best Of. Which “Hold On” song is it? Is it even that at all, or did you change the song title from something else?
So, as far as I know, it it uses music track fingerprinting, probably combined with the track length. But even that can be fooled, when the same track is published on different albums.
And even if the track was only ever on one album, what about when that album is re-issued with a different album cover?
I have 3,776 songs* in Music, almost all of which were ripped from CDs. I handle it this way:
- I download an album cover image when I rip, because I use it in a FileMaker database that catalogs my music collection
- I give Music’s Get Album Artwork a try, because if it succeeds, it takes less disk storage than if I apply the album cover image to each track
- If Music gets the right album cover, fine. If not, I appy the artwork I downloaded
- Sometimes Music initially has an album cover, but loses it later. I have a smart playlist that shows any tracks that are missing artwork. Periodically I check it, and apply my downloaded artwork to those tracks
- Occasionally I notice that Music has changed the album cover, so I fix it by applying my downloaded artwork. I used to notice this sooner, but Music no longer allows the display of artwork in the Songs list.
* Weirdly Music says “songs” on my iMac, but “items” on my MacBook Pro – and has for years and years – even though both machines have the same items in the collection.
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If Delicious Library was relying on Amazon for metadata, it was definitely suspect. I’ve posted low-rated reviews of multiple digital albums on Amazon because the metadata was complete garbage.
Relying on a closed commercial source for data is always going to be iffy simply because they have little incentive to ensure that the data is accurate. The thing about crowdsourced data is that inaccuracies will get corrected over time by volunteers who care about the data being accurate. A closed commercial source isn’t going to bother to pay someone to maintain their data if it’s not affecting the revenue stream—and it rarely will, because the big customers don’t care enough about accuracy to demand it. It’s only end users who really care, and they’re not the ones paying separately for metadata.
Because of this, I think the CDDB data was overall more accurate than the Gracenote data. Sure, it was initially weak, but it improved as more people contributed data, and motivated volunteers helped weed out bad data. Gracenote closed the data to volunteer maintenance, so errors that were found by end users never got corrected. I will always trust an established crowdsourced data store that’s maintained by volunteers over a closed commercial one that doesn’t allow end users to submit corrections for the inevitable mistakes (or does allow such submission but never actually acts on it—I’m looking at you, Amazon).
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As of when? Version 11.1.6.37 on Big Sur still allows it. I know I’m a few years behind, but this doesn’t strike me as a feature they would have any particular reason to remove.
Beginner. I have nearly 60,000, and I know that my collection is dwarfed by those of really serious music aficionados. Granted, mine would be bigger if I had more money or was willing to pirate, but the only truly reliable source of pirated music I ever found was Usenet, and the amount of music being posted there dwindled to a trickle years ago.
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The ability to display artwork in the Songs (Column Browser) view was lost when the Music app replaced iTunes, in macOS 10.15 Catalina.
I own all the CDs I’ve ripped from. The only other tracks are the 11 in the U2 album gifted by Steve Jobs, and 22 from a 2005 Pepsi promotion.
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The album art is still available in song view if you enable it in the view options
menu:
But I never liked the way it looked in Music compared to iTunes which is why I still use 10.7 CoverFlow and it works fine with over 42,000 tracks in my M1 Air.
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I would add that this is a good reason to also do a second rip in AIFF or Apple Lossless using XLD so that if one needs to burn a CD again, it’s easy since the log files can reconstruct the disc.
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Thanks, I missed when that option was added.
Yeah, that’s what I do: rip to Apple Lossless using XLD, and I save the log and cue sheets.
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I would look on my Catalina Mini system to see if it was there but I deleted the Music app some years ago once I was sure that iTunes would still work after having been installed with Retroactive. I think I had to disablle SIP and use AppCleaner or similar to delete the app.
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Yes, assuming there are indeed volunteers who want to spend the time required to maintain a database…and don’t get fustrated if hooligans or malicious people try to mess things up.
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Sorry I don’t have a digital solution to this issue, I am seeing it also on iTunes in Sierra and iPod Touch.
I’ve got 920 albums (not sure how to find how many Tracks) on my main Mac: a wide array of old free Samplers, downloads from iTunes Store, and 300+ purchased CDs burned to digital (which puts me in the proto-Beginner group ;-). At one point I had a few dozen tracks from borrowed-from-library CDs but I deleted those after feeling guilty about it.
The art I’ve tried over the years to ‘automatically sync’, found images of matching cover art online and copy/pasted to the Tracks’ info window, etc. but in recent years things have gone haywire, missing art, wrong art etc. It was a cool feature when it came out but I’ve given up on it.
The only solution I can think of to matching art to music these days would be to stick to physical collections, ie the Album sleeves and jewel case CD insert!
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Most of my music is also ripped. I have scanned the covers from nearly all of my albums. I keep the images (scaled down so the short edge is 200 pixels - no good for printing, but just fine for displaying on my iPod’s screen or on my car stereo’s display) in a FileMaker database, that I use for tracking all the music I own. And I have added those same image files to the ripped tracks in my Music library.
I have steadfastly avoided using any kind of automatic artwork mechanism, because there’s too many opportunities for failure. Even if the algorithm picks the correct artist/album, many albums have been re-issued with different cover art, sometimes dozens of times. And I want the artwork from my disc, not some canonical image or the image from the most recent release.
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