iTunes 12.4

I gave up on Get Album Artwork years ago. it occasionally attached incorrect artwork and more often doesn't find anything. Fortunately I have a scanner because I have a lot of album that I can't find artwork for anywhere on the web. I also have a lot of albums with only 200px or 300px images on the web.

Besides not finding art, the only problem I've had was WIFI sync screwing up the art on my phone. It didn't screw it up in my library. I stopped doing WIFI sync.

 

According to the manual, yes it does!

 

My problem is that they're making it harder to get it. When it doesn't find it/gets the wrong one, I go on Google Images and find a good one. With a former upgrade they removed that from the right-click menu on a song (or group of songs). My workaround was that it still showed that option in the playlists, and so all I had to do was go to my "recently added" playlist and add it. (I get all of my albums artwork as soon as they are added to my iTunes library.) Now that's gone, and the only apparent way to get the album artwork is to go into the "albums" view, which is such a pain. C'mon Apple...

 

I decided to embed all artwork at the file level at least two years ago. The Apple mechanism was just too buggy and unreliable. Fanart.tv has great cover art. Album Art Exchange (http://www.albumartexchange.com/covers) and Devil Finder (https://images.devilfinder.com) are good backups.

 

I just discovered another navigation they eliminated. If you drop down the up next list, you can't right click on one of the tracks and go to that track. The only options are Go to Artist, Go to Album and Show in iTunes Store.

Syncing music has been broken for a while. Selecting individual playlists no longer works for me. I end up having to drag the playlists to the phone to get them to sync properly. What I found out today is that dragging a modified playlist to the phone, doesn't remove songs that have already been synced to the phone but removed from the playlist. I've been running out of room on my phone so needed to remove some music. The logical thing is to do this in the playlist, but no matter how much I removed, I was still over capacity when syncing. I realized I need to delete all the music from the phone and resync the playlists.

 

Although I don't use iTunes except when I need to update my iPod Classic. Instead, I currently use Sony Walkman players (NWZ-A17, NWZ-E465, and NWZ-X1050) with Media Go (Sony's media management software) which I like better than iTunes.

My experience with album art is that it best to embed the album art in the song itself. I have used Sony Walkman players for years and that is the most reliable way to deal with album art (and it is the way that Media Go stores the album artwork). When I tried to use Windows Media Player (WMP) I found album art to be very difficult to work with because WMP stored the album art as a hidden file within the album's folder, making it difficult to update.

 

This is an issue I've had with syncing: it tends to make managing the music on your player much more difficult that it needs to be. While Media Go (the music management software I use with my Walkman players) does offer syncing, I've found that it is more trouble than it is worth (example: a view (the Media Go version of an autoplaylist) is sorted in a default way that can't be changed), also deleting a song from a synced view/playlist doesn't delete the song on my player). Instead, I prefer to just select the song(s) and send them to my player. If I want to delete a song from my player, I just go into the player's area in Media Go, select the song and delete it. It is simple and reliable.

 

I've got several songs trapped in an old iTunes account in M4P format. iTunes seems to think that even with the correct password these files can't be opened or burned to disc [insert commentary regarding Steve Jobs sexual proclivities here]. Does anyone know of a converter that can take these songs and make them MP3s? Preferably one that does not come with bloat/malware and is relatively inexpensive. I don't see any point in spending a lot of cash for a dozen songs.

 

dBpoweramp Music Converter. I use it all the time.

https://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

 

I use Column Browser in the Songs View. Go to the Album Title column type the first letter of the album title you want to add artwork to and scroll down to the title you want. With the title highlighted go to the top of the page and select Edit>Get Info and answer Yes to editing multiple items. When the Get Info box appears select Album Artwork and then Add Artwork at the bottom. Browse to your desktop or wherever you saved the Artwork from Google or Album Art Exchange or wherever else you get Artwork from select Open and you are good. The Artwork is embedded and should stay with your files when synched to your mobile device. Reading this explanation is really more difficult and time consuming than actually doing it.

 

Exactly what I do if I forget to add artwork before adding the files to iTunes. I drag and drop rather than browse.

Slightly OT, I upgraded my iPhone 5s to iOS 10 and the music player is awful. There are some usability issues outside the music app too. I'm thinking of rolling back to iOS 9

 

It's amazing how Apple still has such a good rep when every year since the turn of the millennium they've continued to screw up iTunes and make it less and less useful and easy to use. It's truly amazing. What is wrong with Apple? I loved it up to the "cover flow" period, but now I mainly suffer it.

 

Right, I use that if the "Get Album Artwork" function doesn't automatically find artwork on Apple wherever it's looking. The option to have Apple search for the artwork is getting harder and harder to use every update.

 

Pretty SOP for Apple these days. They decide to get rid of a feature but instead of simply removing it, they make it harder and harder to find over several releases until they are pretty sure not too many people can find it any more, then remove it.

They did the same thing with giving songs star ratings on the iPhone. It moved around a few times, then "poof", gone.

Probably cuts down on the complaints to service a bit.

 

It's gotten to the point where I keep a file of square images that I can insert if iTunes can't/won't find the appropriate album art. Much to my wife's dismay these images are often that of women is various states of undress. I blame Steve Jobs.

I managed to free the songs trapped in that old iTunes account. By authorizing and deauthorizing and authorizing the computer and then reopening that bloated POS iTunes as an administrator I was able to force it to burn a couple decent discs. In most cases we only use iTunes for my phone and iPad. Soon enough the phone will be replaced by something not in the wretched Apple ecosystem. I'll use the iPad until it dies and then maybe get a Surface. I've had enough.

 

I wonder sometimes how far the rubber band can be stretched before it breaks. I'm right there with ya. It's amazing what POS most desktop computers are. Macs are the still the best most reliable systems with decent enough application support to actually get work done, but they too are going downhill rapidly. Phones in general have devolved into toys for the technically illiterate, not that you should have to be technically literate to place a phone call. But as tools, they kind of suck. I hate typing anything on a phone or tablet.

 

I can no longer sync my iPod Classic with the latest version of iTunes. The iPod icon appears, but it is greyed out and unclickable or selectable. Anyone else have this issue???

 

I synced mine yesterday

 

Me too. But I figure support for the classic will be going someday soon. Then I'll be stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place when I need the latest version of iTunes to work with my phones and AppleTV, but an older version to work with my iPod. Hopefully my iPod hard drive will croak before then. It's due

 

I have an iPhone 5s and my guess is iOS 10 is the last version I'll be able to put on it. I'm not going to ever buy a phone without a headphone jack. I rarely listen to anything on my phone, but the few times I do, I don't want to need to search for a bluetooth headphone or an adapter. If I'm in an environment where I can't play it though the speakers, I'll already have headphones with me, usually plugged into my iPod. I just unplug from the iPod and plug into the phone. That can't happen with the iPhone 7 so I won't be buying one.

Unfortunately, I am stuck with iPods. I haven't found another portable player that has the features I use: shuffle by album, sync play counts and date, smart playlists that key off of play counts and other tags, and scrobble.

 

I must be doing something wrong or not using the correct esoteric functionality because I keep updating to the next iTunes version and having no problems.

Currently running iTunes for Mac 12.5.1.21 and again — no problems.

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

I guess you just don't use the functions that disappeared.

 

I did love the color-matching in the Albums and Playlist views. Now a boring white background for everything, which mildly sucks.

Not really a functionality problem though. For all my importing, playlist-creating, album art tweaking, and listening use cases, nothing but boring problem-free success.

I have zero interest in banging on the iTunes UI until I find something that breaks or disappoints me.

 

I didn't need to bang on it. I tried doing things I do every day.

Navigate to a track in the songs view of the library from a playlist is gone. I do this frequently enough that I discovered it missing within a minute or two. Prior versions had Music at the top of the Show in Playlist menu. That's gone, and in the Go To menu, you can go to the artist or the album views of the library. My library is big enough that both of those views are unwieldy, 4,500 artists, 15,000 albums. For some things I use this navigation for, going to the album will be OK, but not most of the time. The only thing I can think to do to get around this is to create a play list with all my music in it and name it so it sorts at the top of the list. That's a stupid thing to have to do.

Go to a track in the Up Next list is gone. I don't do this as frequently so I didn't discover that it was missing until my third time going into iTunes after upgrading. It boggles my mind that you can't jump to the track in the up next list.

Finding problems with iOS 10 took about a minute as well. iOS 10 is bad enough that I'm going to downgrade. Unfortunately, I can't do that with iTunes. The first thing I did after upgrading iTunes was add 90 albums. It would be a lot of work to downgrade.

 

I’ll admit I’m an extremely linear, simplistic, and non-demanding iTunes user. All that lateral, Go To, Up Next, track rating, context shifting stuff, I never do. It never occurs to me, while listening to a playlist, to want to navigate directly to a song view window showing the track that’s playing, so I’m not disappointed I can’t do that or mad that I used to be able to do that.