ITunes 7.3.2: ArtWork does not match Images on Cover Flow View and iPod

Question

Hello everyone, this is my first post, thanks in advance for any and all help.
I have loaded most of my music collection onto iTunes, and authorized it to get album artwork. It has only found about 60% of my cover art (I have a lot of international discs, etc.), and of what it does find maybe 60% is correct. So I have spent a lot of time adding artwork by either scanning in cover art or cutting and pasting from the web. I go to "Get Info" and check the artwork tab all the time to make sure that only artwork that is correct or that I have added is attached to each of my song files.
However, I have noticed that there is a significant amount of my song files that, when I use cover flow view, or when I play the songs on my video iPod, the artwork that is on the artwork pane and what appears on the cover flow view don't match. Or the artwork that is in the artwork pane (and the only artwork in the get info artwork section) and what shows up on my iPod, don't match up. It is, for an OCD completist like me, rather annoying.
As an example, I have a lot of compilation albums. I have probably 13 different albums by different artists but which all have the same name of "The Ultimate Collection". There are some tracks for each album where the artwork pane and the cover flow view artwork match, but not all of the tracks.
I selected "group compilations when browsing", but that doesn't help. I selected all the tracks from the same album and clicked yes to whether it is a compilation, and that didn't work.
Does anyone have a simple, QUICK solution for making the artwork I have put in the artwork pane override or force itself on the cover flow view? Horrible phrasing I know, but thank you in advance for your help!

Answer 1

I had the same problem when I updated to 7.3, but I was able to fix it.
As far as I can tell, itunes 7.3 sees all music files (in your user/itunes/music folder) with the extension .mpg as quicktime movies, not mp3's and itunes won't let you add a cover to them. The problem is that songs imported as mp3's by previous versions of iTunes were all given the extension .mpg and not .mp3 (at least on my machine). I was able to fix the problem by simply changing the .mpg to .mp3 for all of my songs. As soon as I did this, the album artwork showed up again.
You have a few options for how you change the extension. You can right click on every file in your itunes library and select "Show In Finder" to change the file extension, or if you have many songs to fix (I had 793) you can download 'A Better Finder Rename' (search for it at www.versiontracker.com, it costs $20 to change more than 10 files at a time) which will make the changes automatically. If you are cheap you can always set up an automator work-flow to get the job done.
Hope this helps