iOS7 - iPhone or iPad music out of sync with iTunes

Recently I have a problem with my iPhone 5 (iOS 7) (Music). The playlist is out of sync with my iTunes. Every time I sync with my iTunes on my Mac, the smart playlists are not updated on my iPhone. The symptoms are:

• I have a smart playlist that only stores all songs that are added within a month ago. However, the smart playlist on my iPhone (iOS 7) does not get the latest songs and refresh the playlist. It still keep the songs that I have added a few months ago. 
• All the new songs in my smart playlist still added into iPhone music, but the playlist is not refreshed.

I have tried various methods, such as

• Delete the smart playlist and re-sync again.
• Delete all songs and re-sync with iTunes again

None of them works because when I re-sync, the smart playlist "auto-magically" bring back the old songs in the list, as if the information is stored somewhere in iPhone and never get removed.

After several attempts and googling around, finally I found a solution that works for me. If you have something similar, here is a solution:

• Plug your iPhone into PC/Mac with iTunes.
• Click on the iPhone tab and select Music tab.
• Uncheck "Sync Music". It will warn you that all songs and playlists on your iPhone will be removed (this is OK because we would like to start from clean sync).
• Click "Apply" and wait until it is fully sync. 
• Then go to iPhone.
• Select Settings -> General -> Usage
• You will see the space that Music consumes, i.e.

• Next select Music

• Swipe to the left on "All Music". This will remove the indexes as well after the clean sync to ensure that iPhone does not store any old data.

• Select Delete.
• Then go back to iTunes and select iPhone -> Music, select "Sync Music" again. Complete the sync and chceck your iPhone.
• This works for me on iPhone 5/iOS 7 with iTunes on Mac.

Managing iTunes album art

Album art is a wonderful idea for digital audio collection and make navigating between albums so much easier in iTunes.

Since iTunes version 7.0 onwards, you can download the album art of a song or a group of them from iTunes store.

Open iTunes, right click on a song or a group of them and select "Get Album Artwork", iTunes will download the album cover and store them accordingly.

There are two issues with this feature:

• Portability: If you switch to another media player other than iTunes, the downloaded album art from iTunes will not copy across.
• Customization: How to customize the album art of your own.
  

This article will examine these two issues.



Portability
By default, iTunes will store all the downloaded album art under iTunes/Album Artwork folder. This means when you switch to another media player, the new media player will not understand how iTunes organize the artworks.

In order to support portability of the album artworks, you will need to embed the album artwork into the mp3 itself. There are two ways you can do that with your existing album artwork from iTunes:

• Manual cut and paste: If you right-click on a song in iTunes (with album artwork downloaded from iTunes store before) and select "Get Info", go to "Artwork" tab and you will see the album art. Click on the album art and perform a Cut (Command-X in Mac) and Paste (Command-V in Mac). Click OK. This will embed the artwork into mp3 now instead of storing into the default iTunes folder.
• Use Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes: This script will re-embed the artwork into mp3 of the select files. Note that this script requires some knowledge on how to install custom scripts in iTunes. Check out the link above for installation instructions.

Note that embedding artwork into mp3 will allow you to bring along/transfer your music collection easily without worrying about additional data. However, by doing this, you are increasing the file size of the mp3 and hence might consume more space.

Customization
Although iTunes store has a lot of album arts available for download, sometimes you might come across some of the albums have no artwork on the store. For example, foreign language albums, or singles, or you might want the exact album artwork in different countries, etc.

In this case, you can find the actual album artwork (an image) that you want to associate for certain tracks and following the instructions below to associate artwork:

1. Right-click on a track/group of tracks in iTunes and select "Get Info".
2. Select "Artwork" tab (if you select only one track) or check "Artwork" checkbox (group of tracks).
   
3. Click Add or double click on the Artwork space and select the image that you want to associate.
4. Click OK.