Sounds like the automatic get art option has run amok. Usually it's pretty good on well-known albums. You may have to do some things by hand. Possible steps:
1) As mentioned in the earlier response, you can delete art song by song. Select the first song of an album, then Get Info and click on the artwork button top right. If you then see the album art in the box, select it and hit the delete button, then choose "next" and repeat until the entire album is done. This is effective, but labor intensive.
2) You can also do an entire album at once. Select all the tracks of an album, Get info, click on the artwork box so that it "lights up," then hit delete. By the way, just because the art's not showing up in the artwork box doesn't mean it's not there. You can still select the artwork box and hit delete. (I've had this step not work sometimes—I'm not sure why.)
3) You could just drag in the appropriate art for each album. Select all the songs in an album, Get Info, then drag the image you want onto the dialog box (the green plus sign will appear if iTunes is accepting the art). The new art will override the old.
(Interestingly, if you are only trying to add art to one song you can, while that song's playing, drag the art onto the art box at the bottom left (apple command-G). This will add the art to the song, but it won't delete the old art. That'll still be there and you can toggle back and forth between the old and the new. To delete a single track's art, you'll have to go into the Get Info section.)
If the tagging is more fundamentally messed up, any new art will just have the same problems as the old, and show up in the wrong places.
4) Sometimes iTunes gets confused—and the more songs you've got from different sources (and stored in different locations), the more this can happen. I've found that old tagging can survive in unexpected ways unless you really clean it up. Make sure the album title isn't shared with any other albums; make sure that none of the problematic tracks is (or ever was) a compilation track; and delete any "album artist" info—I've found that can get a bit screwy (select an entire album, Get Info, type a couple of spaces in the Album Artist field, then delete them.
5) If I'm really having problems with an album, I've sometimes had to select the album, delete the album artist info, turn the album into a comp, change the title slightly (one character is sufficient), hit OK, and then reselect the album to undo all those changes. This seems to reset any tagging that's been held over. Last resort, short of reimporting everything.
It helps, of course, to practice good housekeeping: store your library and files in the same place, make sure that a band is spelled only one way (Bruce Springsteen; B. Springsteen; Springsteen, B., and so on), and make sure that an artist doesn't have two albums with the same name (for example: "45"). All these things can mislead iTunes into thinking that one album should be using another album's art. This can also happen if you ever take a song off a compilation but want to attach new art to it. You'll have to click "no" on the compilation button unless you want the song to be using the compilation art, not its own art (for example, a great looking 45 picture sleeve you found online). It'll also help if you no longer use the compilation album title for that culled track.
― Michael Train, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 06:28 (seventeen years ago)
nine years pass...