Album art showing up randomly?

Ok, so all my music has the associated album cover for each album, and as such, all art shows up just fine in iTunes. Now, when I'm playing songs on my 5G 30gb iPod video, album covers show up in the display for some albums, but not for others. Obviously, if no album art showed at all at any time, I'd hypothesize that I have some album art setting toggled off, but some show up, some don't. I just received this iPod today for Christmas, and I've found the included documention to be quite sparse. I'm well aware I could simply be overlooking something. I looked at the manuals on apple.com and searched on here, but didn't encounter quite the same issue.

Can someone point me in the right direction? I'd like to see the art each time I play a song or album, instead of not knowing if it will display or not.

I dont experience this. Have you tried deleting the ipod and reloading it all. It may help.

One of the things I've found on my 5G iPod is that cover art for some tracks takes a while to show up. It doesn't show up immediately, but it does eventuslly come up once a track has been playing for a few seconds.

Are you waiting a few seconds after each track starts to see if it's there?

I haven't deleted everything and reloaded yet. I'll try it.

Yes, I've given the songs plenty of time to play and load up artwork. Usually at least a full minute, if not the entire song. I read that some have had the album art 'frame' show up empty, but not even that is showing up - only text predominantly across the screen, ie. like older gen. iPods that didn't display art at all.

I just updated the software too if that helps any, because as soon as I plugged it in, iTunes suggested the update from 10.2 to 10.2.1, I believe.

In iTunes, select the iPod in question, click on the music tab at the top of the screen and ensure the "Display Album Artwork on your iPod" box is checked.

This issue arises because iTunes 7 does not embed the artwork in the ID3 tag of the song file, but simply associates the artwork with the file in the iTunes database. Unfortunately having that box checked will not always result in having artwork displayed on your iPod for all music.

It's checked. I found that setting upon initial setup, and made sure it was checked.

That's what is kinda vexing, because I seem to have all the bases covered. It's not really that important, because the iPod will rarely even be in hand for me to see the album art in question, but I'm just not understanding why some art shows up while other art doesn't, when there is absolute consistency in how I added the art to my files, and all art is there upon further verification.

Any more ideas, or is this the end of the rope?

You can read this rather lengthy thread about this over at iLounge. I think there is a resolution in there somewhere.

Thanks baggss. I'm reading the thread now and hoping to find some answers. I guess part of the problem is that I'm ignorant to many of the resources out there available for assistance. I'm not an apple veteran, so I'm still just learning the best places to look for answers to my questions. Thanks again.

**edit** Problem solved, thanks to the thread you directed me to. I had to deselect 'display album artwork', then sync, then reselect 'display album artwork' again, and sync again. It goes thru the process of 'optimizing album artwork', and after that, ivoila! - all artwork shows up.