Cover Art Questions

[Thraxen]

I'm having issues with cover art on the D2. First off, most my songs are in MP3 format and have the cover art embedded. The D2 handles quite a few correctly, but it totally screws up some covers. You might see a portion of the picture correctly, but most of it will be a green and red blob.

Then there are a few songs that cause the D2 to either lock up completely or crash back to the main menu. Once I remove the cover art the D2 will play these same songs just fine.

So what's going on here? Are there limits on the size, color depth, etc... on the cover art that is causing these issues?

Thanks!

[wader]

Do you have examples to offer, please?

I embedded all of my latest MP3 album covers with jetAudio VX, using the "scale to 100x100" option, actually. But, some of my MP3s have not yet been scaled down and work fine in terms of viewing. At least, colour depth hasn't been an issue, from what I could see.

Have you tried a tool such as mp3tag to determine if any "problem" files for the D2 - either in cover art or hosing things - might have odd tag values or different ID3 levels than your "well behaved" files?

Also, which firmware are you using, please? v2.46 worked quite well for my album cover images. Now I'm putting v2.50 through the paces . . .

- wader

[TedJ]

I'll admit that that I haven't used cover art extensively (can't be bothered and I know what my CDs look like [toungue]) but I've tried with images up to 200x200 without issues.

[Thraxen]

OK, I found some examples of each. Admittedly, I may just be using cover art that is too big for the D2... but here's what I found...

I have one song with a cover sized 223x200 (WxH) that displays fine. Another with art sized 200x200 that plays fine, but the cover art is a jumbled green mess. Then I have another with a cover sized 200x210 that either crashes or locks-up the D2. You can get the covers here: Link

NIN = fine
STP = jumbled
CS = lock/reset

So if it is simply that my cover art is too big, do you guys know of an application that will automatically resize already embedded cover art? It would be a pain to back through and resize all these

BTW, Jet Audio displays all of them just fine.

[edit] Forgot to add... I'm using firmware 2.50.

[Mr. Black]

i dunno, all my art is stored as cover.jpg at about 500 x 500 and displays perfectly since firmware 2.21 (the earliest FW i've had)

[wader]

Originally Posted by Thraxen

OK, I found some examples of each. Admittedly, I may just be using cover art that is too big for the D2...

. . .

NIN = fine
STP = jumbled
CS = lock/reset

. . .

I created three subdirectories under MUSIC on the D2, one for each cover image and a single MP3 file. I used an MP3 file which had no embedded cover art in the ID3 tags. Each image was renamed to "cover.jpg" for their respective subdirectories.

In each case, the appropriate cover art was displayed and the associated MP3 file played fine in my D2. I rebooted and tried again from different views - Album, Folder, etc. It stayed fine and operated as expected.

So, you don't need to resize the images for them to work fine on the D2. It may be that your music files are somehow giving the D2 a problem, is my next guess. Or, perhaps your move to v2.50 firmware somehow had issues?

- wader

[wader]

OK, I just saw your email pointing to the actual music file samples.

I got the same symptoms as you with the original files.

Everything worked fine if I simply removed the album art ID3 tag data from each music file, then placed the album art .JPGs in their respective subdirectories. But, placing those original images back into album art ID3 tags within the MP3 files caused the original, odd symptoms to come back.

Taking your separate .JPGs, I resaved them with new names to remove some potential oddness in the EXIF data (such as EXIFinfo offsets and byte orderings which I couldn't confirm as being correct in the CS and STP files) among other things such as normalizing the colour palettes (which seemed incomplete in the CS and STP files).

I then re-applied the new .JPGs to your music files within the ID3 tags, using their original dimensions (i.e., not pre-sizing down to 100x100).

All is now well, it seems!

Here's the updated cover art files - please consider re-applying them to the ID3 tags of your respective music files and testing on the D2, again.

- wader