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Album Artwork corruption on iPhone 3G

By Wayne Dixon Fri, Dec 5, 2008 @ 11:57 AM

I don’t use my iPhone much as an iPod since I have a 30GB iPod, but I was using it the other day and came across a very interesting bug. Now, this could entirely be just isolated to my iPhone, but I’m not sure. It seems that some of the album art for the songs on my iPhone are completely wrong. It seems as though there is a mapping error on them.
Here are a few examples:

3084092264 d4874b5172 m Album Artwork corruption on iPhone 3G

3084092774 f42eeb9ace m Album Artwork corruption on iPhone 3G

3083254173 96bed451e1 m Album Artwork corruption on iPhone 3G

3084092670 8da790ffbb m Album Artwork corruption on iPhone 3G

I know it’s not entirely wrong, since the podcasts do have the proper album artwork, as shown below.

3084092984 52739d833e m Album Artwork corruption on iPhone 3G

3083255211 b53b53e910 m Album Artwork corruption on iPhone 3G

I also know that it’s not embedded within the mp3, because I do not have this problem on my iPod at all and there is overlap between my iPod and iPhone and they both are synced with the same library. I don’t know if it’s just something within my iPhone’s iTunes database that’s gotten corrupted, or whether it’s something actually wrong with my iPhone itself. Or whether there is a memory module that is starting to fail, I’m not sure.

There is a fix for this. You have to remove all of the songs on the affected album from the iPhone and then re-sync those songs. This will re-sync the proper artwork. Now, some will think well, yeah, that’s not that too difficult. No, it’s not, yet there is no reason why this should be happening at all. Now to spend the time fixing all of the songs.

If you’re having the same issue or know of an alternative fix leave a comment.

  • daniel

    I am having this same problem and it is driving me up a wall. Every now and then I'll have 2-3 albums with the wrong artwork, so I remove them, resync them and everything's fine. Then a few days later its some other albums doing it all over again!

    • http://idk? ben

      yup ive just realised the same prob so i googled it nad here i am , and it is soo annoying , and its getting worse?

  • Tim

    Good to know I'm not the only out there having these issues. But your fix doesn't work for me. Because after I deleted the songs that have the wrong cover art and re-added them, the iPhone still mixed up artwork only differently from before. It seems like a never ending thing to keep deleting and adding until the iPhone finally gets it right.

  • Ian Wexler

    I'm having the same problem. One really weird thing about it is if I take an album that this is happening to and delete the album artwork and then add it back, then every song gets fixed except the first track on the album. But in order to fix the first track I have to delete it from my iphone and then add it back. I really can't figure out what's making this happen, and it is weird that it only happens to certain albums. But yeah, I guess your solution seems like the only thing that works.

  • Adam

    Absolutely driving me crazy!! Is this an Apple fix for this??

  • !RICH!

    ive had several different problems with album art and the iphone all have been checked with itunes and ipod to show no problem:

    -album art is shown for the wrong album
    -random pictures which i have no idea where have come from are on in both modes
    -pictures shown in cover flow are correct but when tilted into now playing mode either disappear or change?! (very annoying one)
    -pictures shown in now playing disappear during cover flow when selected, but will change to the correct one when album is no longer highlighted
    -album art in now playing mode is moved to the left bottom corner and the album art for the next album is shown as well, like a split-screen.

    after unsyncing and resyncing between each of the indivual problems above it'll work for 3/4 days then a new problem will arise or return. FIX IT APPLE!

  • http://mongoos150.com Mongoos150

    Unfortunately this is extremely common – and the “fix” you quoted works for a while, until artwork starts moving around again. Apparently this extremely widespread, and we won't have a true solution unless Apple addresses it.

  • Adam

    Hi,
    Im having the same problem, the first frame of my Youtube podcasts are becoming the artwork for some of my videos.. Its very strange. I havent re-synced the songs yet. But ill give that a go. thanks =]

  • John

    I have this problem and I mostly listen to audiobooks… so I look down on my phone and see the Robot Chicken 'cover' over my Wheel of Time books for 40 hours.

  • Ivczo

    Hey!
    I have the same problem. It happened when I synced my BBC Radio 1 enhanced podcast!!
    Most of my artwork has been replaced by the pics included in the podcasts…

    I never used the syncing thing before cause i have 80Gb of UNSORTED music on my PC. So whenever I put tracks on the iphone i put down all the right info (title, artist, artwork, genre, etc…)

    Cant be arsed to delete all the songs i've put on me iphone! Took me sooo long to sort them all out properly :(

    Hope Apple resolves this…

  • capristeve

    im having the same problem since updating to the latest version of itunes…even removing albums and re-syncing songs is not working…every time i re-sync another album has the wrong artwork…the only thing left to try is restoring the entire phone…which i dont want to do !!!

  • Paul

    ok, here's what I found. I was also getting wrong tracks on wrong albums and albums not appearing on the cool album scrolling interface… Then I saw that when an album has the same name as an album by another artist eg. “Greatest Hits” , “Best of” etc.. it gets all confused between the two and displays the wrong info. I just renamed all the albums to include the artists name eg: “Greatest Hits – The Killers” and all is fine with the world…….. :-)

  • Andreas

    I have the same problem with my IPhone, hoped the new OS 3.0 would help, but it didn’t :-(.
    The covers from the podcasts are mixing with the album covers, in cover flow the podcast covers appear too, but get jumped over as soon as your on them, the next cover is black then, really crazy.
    Paul, I only have a few albums in my library currently, and none of those has the same name.

    • http://www.macgasm.net Joshua Schnell

      We’ll have to look into a work around for 3.0. Ideally they would have fixed this up in the update like you said.

  • Andreas

    Is there some way to report such bugs? Like a bugzilla or something like this?

  • http://www.waynesworkshop.com Wayne Dixon

    Yes, there is a way. The website is http://bugreport.apple.com/. I haven’t filed a bug yet but I might do so soon.

  • Chris

    Your bug report addy is all jacked up.
    FYI

    • http://www.macgasm.net Joshua Schnell

      It just worked for me… weird.

  • Lucinda

    I’m having a different album art issue since “up”grading. My iphone “sticks” on whatever album art was most recently listened to; it sort of makes it into a desktop. Which is really driving me crazy. It was one song, iPhone, not the definition of my existence! I like artwork as my wallpaper, not the one crap song I last listened to in order to shave a half minute off my mile. My workout playlist is supposed to be confidential! :D

  • Vince

    I have the same issue. It started about a week ago, before that no problem. The main change to my iPhone was adding new songs. This has to be some type of database corruption but multiple syncs and removal of the database results in the same problem. So Apple must be causing the corruption during the sync.

  • Sumit

    Same problem here on a 32GB iPhone 3GS, and for me the issue really isn’t fixable. I have my iPhone set to ‘manually manage music’ because I don’t have the available space on my laptop to maintain a full copy of my music on both my phone and my laptop.

    It’s extremely disorienting to be listening to Swedish sludge metal but have album art for French electropop…

    • http://www.macgasm.net Joshua Schnell

      Apple’s gotta keep you on your toes somehow… right? LOL.

  • Rahim

    I got the same issue, apple crap all over my music.

  • Edgar

    I am having the same issue i did not read all comments but one other issue is that my iphone is adding a combo of 4 pictures that would show up on my Genius section as the artwork for most albums.
    its 4 pictures T.I. (paper trail), Young Jeey (The Inspiration) Birdman and Lil Wayne (Like Father Like Son) Young Jeezy (Lets get it), it does it for any genre random albums.

  • kj

    yup, same deal here. corruption across podcasts, album art, audiobooks, and iTunes U. It’s whack-a-mole, if you fix it one place, it re-emerges somewhere else. Wrong art showing for one track, sometimes wrong art in CoverFlow, sometimes wrong art in cover flow when cover is one before active cover and then transforms to correct art when album is active selection. Also has the tilt problem – correct art in portrait mode but wrong art in landscape/coverflow mode while selection is playing. Only on the iPhone – a 16GB nano that syncs to the same library has no issues whatsoever.

    I’m going to try to file a bug report. Been going on for over a year now…

  • Alfonso

    More than a year after the first comment in this blog, the problem still exists. Has anybody found a solution?

  • Slimesub5

    I would just like to record that I am having the same problems – any fixes yet?

  • http://myspace.com/villeoke Ville Oké

    I’ve had these problems before and it drove me crazy.

    I’ve come up with a solution though. What you need to do is to sync all the album artwork from your computer. If you change artwork in the iPhone or ipod it will get fucked up. Happened to me on my first generation ipod touch and on my iPhone 3g.

    So change the artwork BEFORE you sync the songs to your ipod.

    If that doesn’t work (which it should), try dragging the songs you want from the iTunes folder in finder. (Hit cmd+r while in iTunes to get to the selected song in finder).

    Basically the key is NOT to edit the artwork on your iPod, but in your iTunes library.

    Hopes this is helpful

    /Ville

  • Will

    I have a similar problem. The interesting twist is that my iTunes displays all of the covers correctly, but my iPhone does not. I am currently syncing through my dock (and my computer tells me that it’s not plugged into a USB 2.0 port, even though it is). I didnt have the problem before using my dock and this whole USB 2.0 message. I may try it back using just the standard cable and see what happens..But it’s rather crap of Apple not to have patched a fix for it.

    Was anyone else using ports that aren’t USB 2.0? I would have thought that it would only affect transfer speed, but whe shall see..

  • Melissa

    I am having the same issues but mine didn’t happen until I got the 4.0 OS. Is there a fix for this?

  • Dax S.

    Do you guys experience this messed up album covers problem up if you leave your iPhone alone? Like, not synching it for a few days or so? Or does is happen when you sync or add new tunes?

    I’ve been having these problems lately (meaning I rarely sync music). Before the issue was the covers in landscape view were messed up. I thought it wasn’t a big deal because I normally resync the album covers from my pc and they were back to normal.

    But today it got worse. When I resynced one album and its artwork most of my tunes share the same covers! The lucky ones… well… their artwork were gone. These now reflects in both portrait and landscape view.

    What gives?!

    I’ll try to resync the artwork and leave the phone alone for a few days. I’ll let you guys know if the problem arises after resyncing my iPhone.

    Hope Apple addresses this soon. Or else I’ll go back to my good ol’ Walkman Phone >:(

  • Jasmin

    Having a similar problem with my iPhone 3GS since I’ve upgraded to OS4. Missing artwork, or mix-matched artwork for my albums. Along with that issue is my recent mysterious music vanishing. I typically ALWAYS do my purchases thru iTunes directly from my iPhone in case I ever lose my HD. I did a sync to have all my purchases transferred from my phone to iTunes on my Mac and now one of the albums that I purchased has been deleted – from my iPhone as well as from my HD.

    I never automatically sync – I like to manually manage all of my music, so I can’t understand what the glitch is with the particular album having disappeared. Only 1 authorized computer. I eject before disconnecting. Do all the steps like I’m supposed to. So what went wrong? Starting to wonder if my iPhone (only 1 years old) is starting to fail.

  • Bob Johnson

    This just happened to me, and searching for an answer, found you guys.

    My iPhone 3G worked perfect for one year, until upgrading to 4.0. Since then there were many problems, too many to go into here.
    But, this problem just started. I don’t normally have music on mine, but podcasts instead. I have had to restore the phone several times. This time I reloaded the OS without a restore. So I didn’t sync any podcasts. There were no movies, music, or podcasts on the phone at all.

    So I downloaded one podcast today. And now that podcastsartwork has become my wall paper. I haunt tried changing wall paper back the normal way yet, as I want to track done the cause first. No luck.
    Any one see this before? By the way, I didn’t actually download the podcast, I had it streaming while I listened, as I was driving and it was over 20 Meg,
    And would not download over 3G.

  • John

    Same problem on iPhone 3GS iOS 4.1, iTunes 10.x. Silly.

  • John

    Same problem on iPhone 3GS iOS 4.1, iTunes 10.x. What’s wierd is I don’t even have the music that the album covers show.

  • http://www.digilogue.net seaghan

    Most companies who respect their customers would either have:

    1. A fix, within a reasonable time after bug reports
    2. An email to customers telling them what’s wrong and what they are doing to fix ir
    3. An item in a FAQ / Support Topic, so that customers who are being frustrated by this bug can help each other by pointing to the URL

    Apple have not done the honourable and respectful thing. This is disappointing.

  • http://www.digilogue.net seaghan

    Thanks Joshua

    Unfortunately, your link just brings me to a general forum and I have not been able to find any specific link to a FAQ or Support Topic on this issue.

    I did however find many frustrated users who are having the same problem – but I can’t find any example of where Apple themselves have replied and pointed to a definitive fix or even ‘hang on, we’re working on this’-type reply.

    I may be wrong but could not find this – thanks in any event for replying.

  • Smothra

    Argh! This is such an irritating problem. I spent hours a while ago sorting out all the album artwork on my iPhone 32GB 3GS. It is fine on iTunes, but as soon as I synch it up it goes mad. Symptoms:
    1. Wrong artwork altogether, in all views; or
    2. Correct artwork on album selection, but wrong picture when playing; or
    3. Correct coverflow picture but incorrect picture when playing; or
    4. Incorrect coverflow/album artwork, and DIFFERENT incorrect picture when playing (the most irritating of them all!!)

    Currently I am listening to Bloc Party with David Mitchell’s smug double chin looking at me.
    Sort it out Apple!!!

    • http://www.waynedixon.com Wayne Dixon

      The funny thing is that I think the corruption on mine is worse than ever. I don’t use my iPhone much anymore for music, I have my Zune for that (yes, I know, I’m a traitor). I use my iPhone just for podcasts and listening to Audible.

      But even now I still get album corruption. I’m not sure if Apple even cares that much about it to be honest.

  • Ray Babbitt

    I have this problem, too. The wrong album art shows up for the wrong song, in portrait view, landscape view, and track list view–the album art is never correct. I even have still frames from movies in my library showing up as album art on some songs. This is ridiculous already!!!