Lots of Artwork missing in iTunes that WAS there before

[puma1552]

All of a sudden, after updating to Mountain Lion and iTunes 10, I'm now missing artwork for half of my songs in iTunes.

Ideas? I feel like I play this artwork song and dance every damn time I do a clean install. I know for a fact that every single time I do a clean install I have to MANUALLY add the artwork back for literally close to 1000 albums, I don't have time for this garbage anymore, what's the deal here? I've also got 10 iPods, meaning I have to reload all music on all ten ipods when I get it sorted out.

 

[Partron22]

Ideas? I feel like I play this artwork song and dance every damn time I do a clean install. I know for a fact that every single time I do a clean install I have to MANUALLY add the artwork back for literally close to 1000 albums...

I played that game for a while. It turned out that between version 8 and 9 (or some such, it's been a while), iTunes changed the structure of the folders in which it kept media files and artwork. If you updated over the old structure, the library KEPT the old structure, which wasn't entirely compatible with the new, expected, structure. This caused things like disappearing artwork.
Tossing the old iTunes folder onto a backup drive, and starting over with the new, properly structured folder that iTunes will create for you under those circumstances, and reimporting all my music, and a bunch of lost artwork, fixed the problem. I can now update without losing any artwork.
Doing the above was a major pain, but substantially reduced my annoyance down the road. Same may work for you.

 

[puma1552]

I played that game for a while. It turned out that between version 8 and 9 (or some such, it's been a while), iTunes changed the structure of the folders in which it kept media files and artwork. If you updated over the old structure, the library KEPT the old structure, which wasn't entirely compatible with the new, expected, structure. This caused things like disappearing artwork.
Tossing the old iTunes folder onto a backup drive, and starting over with the new, properly structured folder that iTunes will create for you under those circumstances, and reimporting all my music, and a bunch of lost artwork, fixed the problem. I can now update without losing any artwork.
Doing the above was a major pain, but substantially reduced my annoyance down the road. Same may work for you.

Thanks, I knew I wasn't crazy. I've been using iTunes since about '04. Unfortunately for this go it's too late, I reformatted all my iPods and am in the process of reloading the songs into them (I find that simply deleting the music and reloading it tends to leave some garbage behind on the iPod so I go through the hassle of reformatting the iPod completely with all the settings and redoing the column widths in iTunes). I'm definitely going to come back to this thread next time around though, appreciate it.