Do you have any problems with the iPhone Music app not displaying album art, even though you have it in your MacOS Music files?
I have an old MacBook that I use for ripping CDs. I rip, find the album art I want (usually on Discogs), add it to the album. After I get the albums done I send them to my iMac over the network and then into my MacOS Music by drag and drop. Plug the iPhone 13Pro in, bring it up in Finder, then drag the music to the phone.
This has worked since I've bought the phone, and it worked for the entire time that I used my previous iPhone X.
At a certain point a few months ago I realized that album art wasn't transferring along with the albums. After redownloading the albums and not seeing the art, I decided to do some troubleshooting. I read up on similar issues and quickly ruled out a few things.
1. Offload the Music app and reinstalled it to clear the cache: This did nothing.
2. Sign out of Apple Music and sign back in: I've never signed into Apple Music to begin with, nor did I sign into the iTunes Store before Music became a thing.
3. Sign out of iCloud and back in: For what? I don't have iCloud and Music working together in any capacity, at least not that I'm aware of. I don't use iCloud Music Library. In any case, I never sign out of iCloud once I'm signed in on any device that I use regularly.
4. Re-add the album art through Apple Music. This requires me to sign into Apple Music, which I don't use. In many cases their album art has proven incorrect and has ruined the existing art on many users' libraries. Remember the iCloud Music Library matching fiasco a few years back? So I have never used that and no point in starting now, since I was trying to figure out what went wrong with library management that had worked before.
I ended up deleting the entire library from my iPhone and started over. Unfortunately I found out that before one does this, one should de-select everything in the iPhone Finder Sync window prior to deleting music. I lost the most recent albums - perhaps 10 of them - from my hard drive. Somehow. I still haven't figured that one out.
To recreate my library, I tried to save time by dragging albums from Music to the iPhone in the Finder instead of using Finder Sync. That takes a coupe of seconds compared to the much longer Sync process. I checked the art after a few dozen albums were uploaded to the iPhone, and got a surprise: now even the albums that had cover art before I started this no longer had it, just the generic music symbol. And thats where I realized what had happened.
After I bought my current iPhone 13 Pro, all that extra storage space started begging for more music, so I started ripping again after not doing it for years. Syncing the music using the Finder is a lengthy, tedious process, so I started dragging files from Music to the iPhone. Its a real time saver, because it takes mere seconds to move an entire album. But now I realized that's because it only gives me the album plus the basic track listing info - nothing else goes along with the transfer. If I want album art I have to go back to doing the full Sync process, which is a pain. It's hard to know exactly what I'm Syncing if I'm using anything but the Artist field. Going by Album name, I was struck by how many albums I had that were titled "The Very Best of", "Greatest Hits", or "Volume 1". And there's no way to know the Artist connected to each title, because I'm in the Album field.
It's also very slow. The Sync process first backs up the iPhone, unless you've already done that and then left the cable connected to the iPhone. Otherwise if you pull that cable out for any reason, and then stick it back in, the Finder will back up the iPhone even if nothing on it has changed. (Technically, the time on the clock has changed, and I guess thats enough to cause a backup). And once its backed up, there's always "Preparing to Sync" which goes on and on...
And which leads to the big reason I don't like to use Finder Sync: the song transfer will be held up at Step 3 by a tiny process called MDCrashReportTool. You can walk away from the computer and go for dinner and a movie, and when you return your Finder will still be stuck at Step 3. Force quite MDCrashReportTool using Activity Monitor, and Finder will quickly wrap up the transfer. Searching for complaints about this reveals that this process has been causing trouble for years now, and Apple has been aware of it for the entire time.
Here's one such example:
discussions.apple.com
I searched on MRF to see if anyone else had this trouble, and I found one thread but it was only tangentially related to the problem. I hope what I've posted helps someone.
I have an old MacBook that I use for ripping CDs. I rip, find the album art I want (usually on Discogs), add it to the album. After I get the albums done I send them to my iMac over the network and then into my MacOS Music by drag and drop. Plug the iPhone 13Pro in, bring it up in Finder, then drag the music to the phone.
This has worked since I've bought the phone, and it worked for the entire time that I used my previous iPhone X.
At a certain point a few months ago I realized that album art wasn't transferring along with the albums. After redownloading the albums and not seeing the art, I decided to do some troubleshooting. I read up on similar issues and quickly ruled out a few things.
1. Offload the Music app and reinstalled it to clear the cache: This did nothing.
2. Sign out of Apple Music and sign back in: I've never signed into Apple Music to begin with, nor did I sign into the iTunes Store before Music became a thing.
3. Sign out of iCloud and back in: For what? I don't have iCloud and Music working together in any capacity, at least not that I'm aware of. I don't use iCloud Music Library. In any case, I never sign out of iCloud once I'm signed in on any device that I use regularly.
4. Re-add the album art through Apple Music. This requires me to sign into Apple Music, which I don't use. In many cases their album art has proven incorrect and has ruined the existing art on many users' libraries. Remember the iCloud Music Library matching fiasco a few years back? So I have never used that and no point in starting now, since I was trying to figure out what went wrong with library management that had worked before.
I ended up deleting the entire library from my iPhone and started over. Unfortunately I found out that before one does this, one should de-select everything in the iPhone Finder Sync window prior to deleting music. I lost the most recent albums - perhaps 10 of them - from my hard drive. Somehow. I still haven't figured that one out.
To recreate my library, I tried to save time by dragging albums from Music to the iPhone in the Finder instead of using Finder Sync. That takes a coupe of seconds compared to the much longer Sync process. I checked the art after a few dozen albums were uploaded to the iPhone, and got a surprise: now even the albums that had cover art before I started this no longer had it, just the generic music symbol. And thats where I realized what had happened.
After I bought my current iPhone 13 Pro, all that extra storage space started begging for more music, so I started ripping again after not doing it for years. Syncing the music using the Finder is a lengthy, tedious process, so I started dragging files from Music to the iPhone. Its a real time saver, because it takes mere seconds to move an entire album. But now I realized that's because it only gives me the album plus the basic track listing info - nothing else goes along with the transfer. If I want album art I have to go back to doing the full Sync process, which is a pain. It's hard to know exactly what I'm Syncing if I'm using anything but the Artist field. Going by Album name, I was struck by how many albums I had that were titled "The Very Best of", "Greatest Hits", or "Volume 1". And there's no way to know the Artist connected to each title, because I'm in the Album field.
It's also very slow. The Sync process first backs up the iPhone, unless you've already done that and then left the cable connected to the iPhone. Otherwise if you pull that cable out for any reason, and then stick it back in, the Finder will back up the iPhone even if nothing on it has changed. (Technically, the time on the clock has changed, and I guess thats enough to cause a backup). And once its backed up, there's always "Preparing to Sync" which goes on and on...
And which leads to the big reason I don't like to use Finder Sync: the song transfer will be held up at Step 3 by a tiny process called MDCrashReportTool. You can walk away from the computer and go for dinner and a movie, and when you return your Finder will still be stuck at Step 3. Force quite MDCrashReportTool using Activity Monitor, and Finder will quickly wrap up the transfer. Searching for complaints about this reveals that this process has been causing trouble for years now, and Apple has been aware of it for the entire time.
Here's one such example:
iPhone - Stuck "Preparing to sync" when… - Apple Community
I searched on MRF to see if anyone else had this trouble, and I found one thread but it was only tangentially related to the problem. I hope what I've posted helps someone.