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:
I know it’s not entirely wrong, since the podcasts do have the proper album artwork, as shown below.
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.
December 25th, 2008 at 1:14 am
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!
January 10th, 2009 at 6:04 am
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.
February 3rd, 2009 at 9:07 pm
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.
February 4th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Absolutely driving me crazy!! Is this an Apple fix for this??
February 5th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
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!
February 11th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
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.
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February 24th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
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 =]
February 25th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
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.
February 28th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
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…
March 19th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
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 !!!
April 1st, 2009 at 7:42 am
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…….. :-)
June 18th, 2009 at 7:11 am
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.
June 18th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
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.
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June 19th, 2009 at 2:42 am
Is there some way to report such bugs? Like a bugzilla or something like this?
June 19th, 2009 at 4:24 am
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.
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June 19th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Your bug report addy is all jacked up.
FYI
June 19th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
It just worked for me… weird.
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September 30th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
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
November 22nd, 2009 at 3:57 pm
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.
January 10th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
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…
January 10th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Apple’s gotta keep you on your toes somehow… right? LOL.
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January 14th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
I got the same issue, apple crap all over my music.
January 16th, 2010 at 4:55 am
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.
February 10th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
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…