Jailbreak & scrambled album art

[Steve Doherty]

I recently jailbroke my 3G and had a fun old time. After a few weeks I restored back to 3.1.3 and went about my business. One weird side effect of this process is that my Album art displays incorrectly on occasion (Iron Maiden instead of Seal for example). Everything plays as normal, so it's no big deal - just a little weird.

Has anyone else noticed this? I wonder whether it was the jailbreak,the restore, or a combination of both?

Cheers,
Steve

 

[MntnDewMan]

I highly doubt that it has to do with either. Probably just a bug in 3.1.3.

 

[timjs]

iPhone Album Artwork Fix

I noticed that I must've done somethign to corrupt the album artwork files on the iPhone itself NOT in iTunes. So here's the fix that I figured out and there's probably more than one:

The only application I have on my PC to connect and act as a file manager for my iPhone 3GS is WinSCP. It's a brilliant piece of software that has a similar look and feel to Windows Explorer (NOT Internet Explorer, look up Windows Explorer if you don't know what it is).

1. Once connected to your iPhone with WinSCP; navigate to the sub-directory or file path: /private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/Artwork and copy all of the files from that directory to your PC desktop or somewhere where you'll remember. Delete the files in that directory once you've successfully copied them to somewhere safe on your PC. DO NOT DELETE ANY OF THE DIRECTORIES OR FILE PATHS.

2. Do the same (copy to PC and delete from iPhone after successful copy to PC) for files that exist in /private/var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/iTunes and for every sub-directory nested under this path. Again: DO NOT DELETE ANY OF THE DIRECTORIES OR FILE PATHS JUST THE FILES.

3. Initiate a "Sync" in iTunes and it will probably give you some message like what's on your phone doesn't match what is in iTunes. That is because you deleted all of the associated artwork and the databases and indexes that match the music/videos/etc. to the artwork. Just click okay or whatever to get past that message and allow the sync to continue. This should rebuild all of the files that you copied to your PC (which were probably corrupt if your artwork is correct in iTunes, but corrupt on the phone).

4. Worst case scenario: RESTORE, but that's absolute last resort. I would first select "Manually Manage Music and Videos" on the iPhone "Summary" page in iTunes and delete all of the music from the phone (NOT FROM ITUNES) and start this process all over with the artwork and database files removed from the phone as well as the music, video and media files on the phone.

5. You will need some level of proficiency to do this or be brave enough to take the chance.....I lacked the proficiency so I took the chance because RESTORE is just not an option when you have a highly customized jailbroken phone. Oh, did I mention that the phone needs to be jailbroken in order to do this fix? Otherwise I would suggest heading over to the Apple support site and follow those instructions for fixing artwork.

Final Tip: Sometimes "getting album artwork" doesn't get the correct artwork or it will appear in iTunes, but not on your phone. My fix for that is to google the song, artist and the word "album" to locate a JPG file that has the album picture that matches your music or video selection. Once you find a decent picture on the web, just right click on it and select "Copy". Then go back to the specific song in iTunes, right click on it and select "Get Info" and when that dialog box opens, go to the Artwork tab and right click in the artwork box and select paste. If there is already undesirable artwork in the box; click on the artwork and hit the "delete" button underneath the artwork box then paste in your artwork.

Have fun...if ain't broke you're not trying hard enough to break it!