1275 - iPhone and Album Art

[Anubis]

Hi, today I ended up with Album Art all over the place on my iPhone.
Not sure what steps I took to get to this corruption, but iTunes was in there and it started doing a Gapless Analysis on the songs at one stage.
Unfortunately I did not see that the Album art was wrong until much later, so the gapless analysis may not have caused it.
I have tried to duplicate it again just now, and didn't. I did get the Gapless Analysis to run though... I can trigger the gapless analysis anytime by dragging an .M4A song onto the iPhone node (in iTunes).

So, there is still some sort of problem with iTunes and MM co-existing.
I will try to narrow down what is causing it and let you know.

For starters, I am going to pin the problem on iTunes doing a gapless analysis.
How do I either..
1) Stop iTunes from doing the gapless analysis
or
2) Get MM to do it for me?

I looked at MM.DB and the songs that iTunes took time over when it was doing the anaylsis, and they all have -1 in the PreGap and PostGap fields of the SONGS table? What are these fields? Should they be zero? 66% of my songs have -1 in these fields.
Also, what is the GaplessBytes field in the SONGS table? What value range should be in for each song?

MM 1275
WinXP SP3 32bit
iPhone 3GS 16GB 3.0.1 [not jail broken]
iTune 9.0.1

Start of another journey, how exciting....

[jiri]

re. 1) I don't know, it doesn't seem to happen on my machine at all, but some people report it does happen sometimes.
re. 2) MM actually does it, even for tracks that don't have that info in MM.DB file (i.e. those -1s) MM uses some default values when synchronizing to iPod/iPhone. I.e. all mp3s already have gapless info calculated, so I don't see any reason why would iTunes repeat the calculation. Time to ask Apple?

Jiri

[Anubis]

Thanks Jiri, somehow I don't think Apple are going to help...

I can now reproduce iTunes doing a gapless analysis very reliably by...

Sync anything you want from MM to the iPhone and get out of MM. The more songs the merrier...
Start up iTunes, and then DRAG a .M4A song (purchased from iTunes store) on to the iPhone node and let it sync.
Within a couple of seconds, iTunes will start doing a gapless analysis of the songs on the iPhone.
Let this finish, in my case an hour later.

The first time I did this with 400 songs, the album art got messed up.
The second time I did it with 2 songs, the album art was fine.

I'll see if I can narrow down how many songs and which ones cause iTunes to corrupt the album art...

But that's all for tonight, catch you in a day or so...

[rusty]

Thanks. Tracked at: http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=6080

-Rusty

[Anubis]

Glad that this problem is now being tracked. I now know it will get more attention and get fixed. Thanks Rusty.

Here's an update on my testing...
I am now using 1277.
I have the # of tracks down to 64 that I can reproduce the corruption with. All are .MP3. 5 are podcasts.
I am now using one of my ripped .mp3's to drag from iTunes onto the iPhone node (in iTunes) to cause the gapless analysis, so it is not related t purchased music.
For what it is worth, the iTunes gapless analysis is only analysing non podcasts music. The 5 podcasts are excluded.

An interesting fact here is that after the analysing, the iPhone's album art is corrupted when looking at it using the iPhone, but when I use iTunes to look at the track's album art, it is not corrupted.

The other interesting fact is since going to 1277, unselecting all sync playlists in MM and doing a sync, clears the iPhone, but then when I reselect the playlist and sync, the album art is not always right. I have to clear/sync and reselect/sync 2 or 3 times before the MM even gets the album art right now. In this scenario, I do not use iTunes at all.

[Anubis]

The other interesting fact is since going to 1277, unselecting all sync playlists in MM and doing a sync, clears the iPhone, but then when I reselect the playlist and sync, the album art is not always right. I have to clear/sync and reselect/sync 2 or 3 times before the MM even gets the album art right now. In this scenario, I do not use iTunes at all.

Update: Going through the MM clear/sync/enable playlist/sync cycle does not correct the album art.
I now go into and out of iTunes when there is no music on the iPhone. Then sync MM and the album art is right. Weirdo...

That's all from for the next 36 hours... off to party for the rest of the weekend.

[rusty]

Anubis,

Thanks. It's hopefully resolved in 1278--jiri discovered a problem with syncing tracks that are auto-converted that caused this behaviour.

-Rusty

[Anubis]

jiri discovered a problem with syncing tracks that are auto-converted that caused this behaviour.

Hmmm, The 64 tracks that I sync to reproduce this problem do not have any "auto-converting" happening. They are all .MP3's.

[jiri]

It might be also volume leveling for the device, or anything like that. Anyway, you'll see if you test the build...

Jiri

[Anubis]

1279 did NOT fix these problems for me.
I still get gapless analysis when I drag a song the iPhone within iTunes. This then corrupts my album art.
I still can not get the album art back to normal, even after using MM to clear the iPhone and resyncing.
Further info, my iPhone has 3 TV episodes on it and 10 ringtones.. could these be causing some issues?

[jiri]

It might help if you are able to find out which track synchronized by MM triggers the problem, i.e. which track iTunes sees as necessary to be analyzed. iTunes probably shows its name in the progress bar. In case this is consistently reproducible with that track, it would be interesting to know more about it.

Jiri

[Anubis]

Hi Jiri, attached is a debug log of syncing MM 1280 with my iPhone.
The steps I took were...
1) Start MM with iPhone already connected to my computer; iPhone has some music on it.
2) Go into configure iPhone device and un-select ALL playlist
3) Sync with iPhone

The iPhone now has no music on it.

4) Go into configure iPhone device and select my SyncTest-32songs playlist (not an auto-playlist)
5) Sync with iPhone
6) Exit MM

The iPhone album art is all screwed up.

Hopefully this will show you something. It probably has something to do with my database, as nobody else is reporting similar problems.
I'll put a comment in the forum that I have sent you this file.

If you need anymore info, let me know.

[rusty]

Anubis,

I was able to reproduce this using a few specific files (see bug #6104). In my case the problem seems to be related to 3 specific files (1 MP3 and 2 M4A tracks). We're going to look into it further.

Have you been able to narrow down which tracks on your sync list trigger the problem?

-Rusty

p.s. I found that when MM get's into a state where it can't write to the iPhone, deleting the Tracks/Movies/Playlists in iTunes, cleans everything so that MM can again work as expected.

[Anubis]

Rusty, I'm away from my computer for the 3 days. Will do some more narrowing when I get back.
Gotta love the iPhone browser don't ya. I'm stuck on a plane right at the moment.