I’ve raised this issue a few years ago. Music is displaying incorrect album art. This is an annoyance and definitely a first world problem. I’ll attach an image from Music on my iPhone.
Apple support is no help. They know it is a problem, but have not fixed it.
Can anyone recommend an alternative to Music? I am in the minority that own a large collection of music and I do not stream music.
Are you downloading the art or letting Apple do that? I have always looked for the art myself and have no issues as long as it is properly embedded.
I use the Onkyo HF Player (free but is paid if you have HF files) on my iPhone but that imports whatever you have on your phone so if the files have the wrong art to begin with, that program will display the same. It’s a good player since it has a real EQ as opposed to the minimal and useless tone controls on the iPhone. Also, it can crossfade tracks.
I think you are wrong. I’m 100% sure that Black Sabbath used the cover from ‘Now that’s what I call music 44’ for ‘Master of Reality’, as shown in my phone. Totes.
At least its not just me.
I have mostly let Apple provide the art and for years it was displayed correctly. A couple years ago I spent some time with Apple Care which eventually agreed that it was a problem that their engineers knew about and that they would notify me when the problem was fixed.
Thanks for the suggestion of the Onkyo Player.
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I too have this problem for some items, and all my music (99% ALAC lossless) has my own embedded artwork (added via the Song Info>Artwork pane in Apple’s software).
Rather than the full AM streaming service, I also use iTunes Match service, which is basically a subset of AM that just does converting of the ALACs to 256kbps AAC, for matching or uploading to my Apple Music Library, then my owned stuff is accessible on other devices. However, same artwork issues.
Really, trying to fix this is difficult to impossible in my experience.
Other software used by audiophiles on the Mac platform (and others) are Plex and Roon.
Roon is more recent, and is strictly music focused, pulling data from data-sources to add a richer information experience (eg. reviews of the album listening to, links to other similar recordings the artist did under aliases, et al.). Plex is a media server type thing, that while also pulling data from online sources, focuses on video as well as music.
Roon charges a decent fee though (mthly/yrly/lifetime), so you have to really like it to want to pay for it. Plex charges a cheaper fee should you want the premium experience (the free one does a lot, but paying adds stuff), but you can buy a yrly/lifetime pass for much less (I bought a lifetime Plex Pass on deal a few years ago for $75). The funny thing is, I never got around to properly using it, so can’t offer much advice.
All I know is with properly embedded art using iTunes, I have yet to encounter any missing and/or incorrect art. I assume there is something different in the Music app on a Mac which is where some are having issues. On my phone I use the Onkyo HF Player I mentioned before and no issues there either although I have used the Music app on my phone and it seemed to display art correctly for the few times I used it. I don’t use any of the Apple Match services as I convert files myself using XLD if necessary or iTunes app.
I had to make a new library and re-import all my music to get it OK. The shift from iTunes to Music messed up my library completely.