El Capitan and iTunes has dumped most of my cover art
Posted by: winkyincanada on 07 November 2015
I "upgraded" to El Capitan, but after making me re-import my entire library, including all movies, TV shows and apps, iTunes has decided to dump about 60% of my carefully curated cover art (completely randomly, from what I can tell). Grrrr. I'm losing the will to fix 800+ albums' worth, particularly after it previous changes made getting the cover art MUCH more difficult.
Ouch, have seen others having trouble with El C... mostly with it messing with 3rd party software so held off updating as I use A+ on my MacBook but, so far have only ripped about 500 albums some cd via iTunes others HDCD via db and an acer laptop copied to my library and some HD downloads. Seems crazy that it's screwing it's own software as well. What is going on?
itunes is simply put a terrible piece of software. Why do you use it?
itunes is simply put a terrible piece of software. Why do you use it?
I've played with some others that have been recommended here and find them to be equally awful. In many cases I can't even get them to install or run. The interfaces are usually clumsy and antiquated.
Is your music library stored on your Mac or on a separate hard drive?
May be worth checking out 'dougscripts', it may resolve or help, depending on your configuration etc. Etc.
Due to my Chord QBD76 requiring a USB driver for Mac (it uses a custom FPGA chip for async.) I upgraded to El Capitan on my Mac Mini & then discovered Chord haven't got a driver for it. Damn, silly old me, how I laughed! So I reverted to Yosemite. Bit of a nuisance, had to download the installer to a USB thumbnail drive, wipe the Mini, & start again.
Anyway, after repopulating my iTunes library it appeared most of the artwork was missing, but then when you clicked on each album it magically reappeared. Don't know why...
I like iTunes. It works just fine for me & I've tried alternatives without success. I guess those of us who like it are accustomed to how it works.
This happened to me on a second computer where I didn't embed the artwork but by going to File-Library-Get Album Artwork on top bar all re-appeared,maybe worth a try?
I believe iTunes has two sources of displayed artwork..
its own cache, which is populated by the 'get artwork' option mentioned and sources from the iTunes store. This is stored external to the music files in the Artwork folder of the iTunes folder structure.. Think this may only contain a reference to the store Artwork as file size is rather small.
The other is artwork embedded in the music files themselves, this is populated by the Artwork tab of the track when you go a 'get info' on the track in iTunes.
if you added the tracks back in manually i dont think it reimports the artwork cache, this is why i add all artwork to the tracks themselves, makes them a little larger but it means all artwork is persistent.
Dougs scripts has a script to add artwork from cache to the files if you wish to go down this route for resilience.
Is your music library stored on your Mac or on a separate hard drive?
Combination of both. 750GB internal (close to full) and a 2TB USB external drive that is now the drive for all new material. On-site backup is to a USB 3TB drive also attached.
Thanks all. Most artwork has now turned up after waiting a while and after "selecting all" and instructing iTunes to "Get Artwork". It may have just been taking a long time to process/find.
Pleased it's sorted Winky. The reason I was asking about your choice of music storage was that the same thing happened to me when I upgraded and forgot to eject my external hard drive before downloading the OS.