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has anyone noticed there album art work not showing up on iOS devices

hippiejfuxfio6, on 18 November 2011 - 11:54 AM, said:

That's bugging me. I was between shaky wifi and 3G so I'm hoping this will fix itself when I get, say, on my wifi. I'm just imagining how much space all my album art would take up on my device yet not having it kind of defeats part of utilizing iTunes Match.

Just saw yet another Macworld article on iTunes Match. This one covers a fix for persistent Error status icons: http://www.macworld....ror_tracks.html

Initial step is to convert the file to an AIFF format.

ted_landau, on 18 November 2011 - 01:42 PM, said:

I can confirm that it works. Until I read that article, it was driving me nuts!

I'm not running into errors, but I'm wondering about songs that are uploaded rather than matched, when it's easy to see the match in iTunes. For example, I bought the Beatles "1" CD and imported it before iTunes brought in the Beatles. When I ran iTunes Match, most of the album matched, but some songs are marked uploaded. Yet I look in the iTunes entry and the songs are right there...same title, same duration, etc. Is there a resolution for what we might think is an incorrect match, to take a song from "uploaded" to "matched" so we can get the upgraded codec?

kmac23valrwz, on 19 November 2011 - 04:52 AM, said:

I was wondering this as well. I noticed on my U2 "War" album, that 8 of the tracks were matched, yet "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "Drowning Man" were uploaded. I found this very peculiar as both songs are available for matching. I deleted "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and then redownloaded it from iCloud, yet it status is still uploaded. So, that did not work.

hippiejfuxfio6, on 18 November 2011 - 11:54 AM, said:

The artwork seems to download the first time you play a song, but the screen does not refresh. So, if you back out to your playlist, album, etc. and then go back to Now Playing, you will see your artwork. It was bugging me, so I just clicked through my main playlists real fast. I didn't wait at all, just a quick forwarding through tracks, and they all were there the next time I played the song. If you're not this picky, your artwork will just trickle in over time.

Ideally, this would just work correctly, but it seems that the bug is the lack of screen refresh, rather than the artwork not downloading.

One thing I discovered - do NOT use iTunes to rip your CD collection... after re-ripping most of my fairly large CD collection (I have about 2000 CDs) in Apple Lossless format (previously, I'd ripped them using MusicMatch on my PC to 320K VBR MP3, the best format I could find that was compatible with my devices back 8+ years ago). However, when starting to load them into iTunes Match, I found a lot of CDs with many (or all) tracks uploaded, that were very popular CDs. When I went to play them, I discovered that many didn't match because the rips from iTunes were absolutely *full* of static... I then tried iTunes on 3 different Macs, and the CDs were not playable on any of them... but still played perfectly on a real CD player... and these CDs are in pristine state, they've only been out of the case to be ripped once previously.
I then searched on the internet, and found XLD Lossless Decoder, that also rips CDs, and uses the AccurateRip database to give you some level of confidence that your rip is correct.
MUCH better results now!

supermurph, on 20 November 2011 - 10:27 AM, said:

I also noticed that lyrics are not loading either. Or if they do, it takes a long time and you need to refresh the screen. Hopefully, this can be corrected.

How to Fix Step 2 and Step 3 Errors in iTunes: Music Media Formats, and Checking Firewall

This solution assumes that you do not have corruption in your iTunes library database. To fix that follow the steps in Apple Support KB ht1251.

Step 1, 2, or 3 Hangs: Problems with Media Formats.

If you have heterogenous media formats in your music files, some of them will FAIL iTunes match, causing it to hang. This is a software error in iTunes match, which should mark the files as "Not eligible" instead of remaining stuck in an endless loop. These errors never occur if all the songs in the music library are unprotected AAC 256 kbps music files encoded by iTunes 10.5.1.

There are two basic ways to upgrade your song media formats to iTunes 10.5.1 AAC encoding - encode all of them at once, or do them selectively. In either method, you must delete the original version from iTunes and your file system. If you previously loaded them to iCloud, get rid of them there also.


You will be able to see a hung file in OS/X under Activity Monitor -> iTunes -> Inspect Process -> Open Files and Ports. In Windows you will have to use standard Task Manager inspections.

In my iTunes library, I found that certain AAC (m4a) files which were encoded in before 2011 were stuck, and m4p Protected AAC files. I had already fixed the encoding of MP3s, so I was suprised that music previously encoded by iTunes was hanging up.


You may convert all files which were not encoded at 256 kbps AAC with a right-mouse click. Find them:

1) individually in iTunes as you discover them in Open Files and Ports trace, or

2) by creating a sort smart playlist that matches their pattern. For example, a playlist with bit-rate < 256k.


After converting them, you MUST delete the previous file(s) from your iTunes library. I suggest you move the actual file to trash, and delete the trash. Archive the files if you wish. If any of them were already matched to iTunes Match, you must delete them there also.

After getting rid of older media formats, re-run iTunes match. Step 2 should complete, and your Open Files and Ports window should no longer show any music file open in your iTunes library. If it does show, convert it and remove the old file from your library.

If you have converted your music library and Step 3 is still stuck, it is likely a Firewall problem. Check the last line in Open Files and Ports, and use the information in the last rows to check your firewall settings. The upload port is shown in this form, 192.168.1.1:53089->72.21.214.201:https. If you see this type of row, but nothing is being uploaded, a firewall or other issue is blocking that port.

In my case the block was created by my broadband modem settings. Check with the installation guide for your modem - typically they can be managed by a http:// address such as http://192.168.1.254. Change the firewall settings as needed.

Just thought I'd pass along my experience thus far: In addition to the whole upload vs. Match that has been discussed, I have three basic issues I'm trying to resolve:

Out of 24,000 songs (after converting an additional 1500 or so to "books" to get under the magic 25k number) it went pretty flawlessly except that I have about 50 or so "missing" tunes that are unexplainable. Like all but one or two songs on an album has disappeared. I know I just listened to the song and have it on an ipod. It just doesn't make sense.

The other issue I'm having is in the duplicates. I can't figure out how it's handling...

A) the legitimate: "If You Want Me To Stay" by Sly which I have on an anthology and as part of the album Fresh. In this instance it deleted "Fresh" and kept the version on anthology... Or in the case of Brian Wilson, it Matched everything but "Love & Mercy" on his CD and uploaded that. Yet Matched the same song on the Orange County Soundtrack.

When I re-download, how will that work if I want the higher quality version or at least the title to remain on both "albums?"



the completely illegitimate: As an example Big Star. There seems to be no distinction between same titles from "Live" & "Columbia: Live at Missouri University." Or KISS, Alive vs. Destroyer, if you know what I mean.

C) There are also some false cases of duplication. I know I only have one copy of certain that are listed as duplicates.

Trying to figure out how to resolve before re-downloading.

i tried multiple times to utilize music match, it's clearly still in Beta regardless of what Apple claims, and when i asked for a refund i was promptly told that all iTunes sales are final, even if the product is "defective"...perhaps they've grown too large as a company when they forget that it's the customer that makes their stock worth hundreds of dollars a share, and if they continue to offer, or should i say, fail to offer real customer service, then those consumers will promptly find an alternative...perhaps Samsung or ???

Shame on you Apple for not staying on top of the multiple errors with the launch of this service.

On the matched problem all I did was deleted the file and said move it to trash then it allows u to redownload it ...just delete then say move to trash and then when the download icon in the cloud column shows up download and you get the higher quality version