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Fix iTunes artwork Error 609 with FixTunes

Tom Clarke

Tom Clarke

  • Updated:

FixTunes (and Royal Trux)With iTunes sitting pretty as the most popular music player on the market, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s near-perfect. In fact, as the program’s development continues apace with Apple’s business plan, it has become increasingly bloated and now throws up some pretty irritating errors. Example: Cover Flow is awesome technology which makes for a much more intuitive user experience when browsing through albums in your music library. But for many users starting out, Cover Flow is a barren wasteland, devoid of album art.

iTunes includes a feature which allows the user to automatically download album artwork for selected tracks but this is not a feature which ever feels like it has been properly implemented. At various times, without warning, users experience the error 609: basically that for some reason, iTunes couldn’t download what the user wanted. With a complete lack of assistance in the Apple support forums, the company has left the door open for yet another 3rd party fix.

The aptly named FixTunes deals with the ‘artwork not found’ error, as well as fixing pretty much any tagging error that’s afflicting your music library. Simply start-up iTunes and FixTunes, select the tracks you want to find artwork or information for (or just select your whole library) and set FixTunes to work, downloading all the required info with the minimum of fuss. Check the data and then click ‘Fix’ to apply it to your library.

FixTunes is particularly useful because it does away with the hassle and work which other ‘simple’ tag-fixing programs always seem to entail. Using a database of over 4 million songs, along with a clever percentage-based accuracy measure, it will only fix what it’s certain about, leaving you to decide for anything below a certain threshold. In testing, we found zero false-positives and a reassuring number of ‘not identifieds’ which just needed a small change to the detected data. Now you too can share in the majesty of Cover Flow!

Tom Clarke

Tom Clarke

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