Some Album Art not Showing in Music App?

[Fallinangel]

Hi,

I mainly have a lossless music library on my mac that is neat and tidy with covers and clean ID-tags. I don't use Apple Music.
I let macOS - previously Music/iTunes -, transcode to AAC when syncing some playlists to my iPhone, which is plugged-in to the Mac (Lightning to USB-C).

I already previously had the issue on Big Sur that some covers simply don't transfer, but usually this could be remedied by restarting the iPhone, resyncing the music files, or logging-in and -out of iCloud.
However, most of these workarounds don't seem to work on Monterrey (Apple Silicon) and the latest iOS.

What I've already tried:
- re-syncing all the music files
- restarting the iPhone, even numerous times
- logging-in and -out of iCloud
- switching "Show Apple Music" on and off
- switching "Mobile Data" on and off

I currently have plenty of free space on my iPhone (>100GB).
Does anybody know a workaround that currently works?

This must be sabotage. How can this in all honesty still not be fixed?

Any suggestions are welcome.

Have a nice day.

Thanks.

 

[Fallinangel]

After reading a post on the Apple user forums, I tried completely resetting the iPhone, then restoring from backup, and re-syncing all music. What first looked seemed promising, turned out to be a huge waste of time.
The result was exactly the same. Not recommended!

 

[Fallinangel]

OK, so after lots and lots of experimentation, resetting, re-syncing, I finally found the issue! In fact, it the behaviour seems to be caused by the Music app on macOS!
It doesn't load the embedded album art until you open the playlist in question and have it actively opened for a couple of seconds, which in turn seems to crash the album art synchronization while syncing.

My guess is that migrating from Big Sur to Monterey and x64 to ARM probably messed this up. Mind you I did a "clean install", my music folder is on a fast external drive, the album art is embedded in the audio files, etc.

Many of my playlists in Music on my Mac are simply displayed as lists or spreadsheets without album art icons. Others are a couple of years old and never really inspected much on macOS, but listened to on iOS.
Yesterday, when I opened some of them and haphazardly switched on album art display with "View as Playlist", I noticed that some cover art was not showing.

At first, it looked like the songs were without artwork, but after checking their metadata, it became obvious that they had the cover embedded (like I remembered).

After a couple of seconds of being open, the playlist seemed to perform some background task and auto-reloaded the album art. What a mess right?

Now I have to go through all the playlists and then purge and re-synce the music files on the iPhone for the fifth time in the last two days...

I wonder if this is somehow linked to the macOS ThumbnailAgent crashing after a couple of days of macOS running without reboot.

 

[patoss92]

Hi, did you fix the problem?

I found this script which can help, but it also takes a lot of time:

https://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=mxreembedartwork

 

[ab123]

Thank you @Fallinangel this was driving me nuts. Great investigating!

 

[MEATLIFTER]

Hrm. I don’t have Apple Music on any devices except an iPhone and an iPad. Like 2-5% of my album art is missing. I’ve tried everything, even leaving it open as OP suggested. Nothing works.

 

[Icehawk]

Same. I tried multiple of these solutions. So far the only thing that’s worked is to delete the album art from iTunes. Sync. Then add it back. Sync. One by one, and it’s as awful as it sounds. How long the art will stick around? 🤷🏻‍♂️

I should note I’m on an intel MacBook Pro. I forget the year. Maybe 2015. For reference.