album art issues

[foosnark]

I'm a former Zune 120 user, just got my J3 last night. Got about 52GB loaded onto it between its memory and a SD card.

The Zune software made a terrible mess out of tags, so I went on a fixing spree to prepare for this. I started with Songbird, then redid everything in mp3tag. All my files are either MP3 with ID3v2.3 tags, or WMA. All of them are nicely tagged and have album art that shows up in mp3tag and Winamp.

But when I play them on my J3, there's a lot of missing album art. I tried a database update and that didn't help. I'm using the Leaf browser but otherwise standard stuff (though I've tried some music UIs, I went back to the default).

Any ideas/suggestions? Is there a maximum resolution or data size the J3 will deal with?

[DSperber]

Originally Posted by foosnark

The Zune software made a terrible mess out of tags, so I went on a fixing spree to prepare for this. I started with Songbird, then redid everything in mp3tag. All my files are either MP3 with ID3v2.3 tags, or WMA. All of them are nicely tagged and have album art that shows up in mp3tag and Winamp.

Is there anything consistent about what music files have their album art appear fine, and what music files don't?

I'd start off simple, and go up from there to try and isolate where the problem is.

First of all, you don't need to have album art imbedded inside of tags. If your music collection is organized with music files in folders that correspond to "albums", you can have one single external album art JPG in that folder with a name of "cover.jpg". And all of the music files in that same folder can have NO IMBEDDED ALBUM ART IN THEIR TAGS.

The J3 (and Winamp) will pick up that external "cover.jpg" image and use it as album art when playing any music file in that same folder (that does not itself have an imbedded album art JPG in its tag). So it's very convenient to set things up this way, as long as your music files are stored into folders that represent albums.


Second, there are certainly known problems with the J3 and WMA files, as far as the WMA tags and specifically the "track number" field. There is some real mishandling of track numbers in WMA files.

I don't have any WMA files myself, so I don't know if there are additional problems with imbedded art in WMA tags.

Again, another strong motivation for purging all of your imbedded album art (which, after all, is duplicated into each music file from the same single album.. which can be efficiently stored as one single "cover.jpg" in the album folder and not in any of the music file tags, if your collection looks like that) and going with "cover.jpg" as your standard technique.


There's no limit that I know of for album art dimensions. Mine are all 500x500.

But they do need to be standard JPG, and not "progressive JPG".


Anyway, I'd purge everything and start over, simply copying one or two folders over (or maybe two artist folders, each of which may have one or two album folders under them) that contain only MP3. See if you can see all the album art when playing music.

Then copy some WMA files, and see if you can still see the album art or not.

But I strongly suggest using the more efficient "cover.jpg" approach if that works for your collection, rather than [duplicated] imbedded art in tags.

[andrew_berge]

Actually, according to the manual, the J3 supports progressive format jpegs, but only up to one megapixel in resolution. Few people use albumart over 1000x1000, so that shouldn't be the problem.
Ordinary jpeg has no size limits on the J3.

[foosnark]

I've been unable to find any pattern to which albums show their art successfully, and which ones don't. Some of the WMAs work, some of them don't, some of them even show art from a completely different album. Most of the MP3s work, some of them don't.

One thing I was unaware of before is that ID3s can have up to 15 images embedded in them, with specific categories ( http://www.richardfarrar.com/embeddi...-in-mp3-files/ ). I suppose there could be some inconsistencies there.

I'll try separating the album art into a cover file, which is easy enough to do in mp3tag. It'll save a bit of space to not have all the redundant copies of the image anyway.

Thanks

[foosnark]

After making sure I had good folder organization (one album per folder) and using mp3tag to extract images and remove them from the ID3 tags and fixing all the messed up WMA album art and generally making everything totally pristine and awesome...

...it still doesn't work in some cases.

And I figured out why: the "broken" ones are PNG, not JPG. ::headdesk::

Thankfully, all I need to do now is batch convert those and resync them, rather than the MP3s themselves.

[Enzyme]

/o\

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by foosnark

After making sure I had good folder organization (one album per folder) and using mp3tag to extract images and remove them from the ID3 tags and fixing all the messed up WMA album art and generally making everything totally pristine and awesome...

...it still doesn't work in some cases.

And I figured out why: the "broken" ones are PNG, not JPG. ::headdesk::

Thankfully, all I need to do now is batch convert those and resync them, rather than the MP3s themselves.

That is good to know to only use JPG for cover art.

[DSperber]

Originally Posted by andrew_berge

Actually, according to the manual, the J3 supports progressive format jpegs, but only up to one megapixel in resolution. Few people use albumart over 1000x1000, so that shouldn't be the problem.
Ordinary jpeg has no size limits on the J3.

The mention of support for progressive JPG's and a max of 1 megapixel is shown in the manual for its discussion of "Photo", i.e. pictures.

There's no such mention in the "troubleshooting" paragraph dealing with why album art images might not appear.

+ Album image is not displayed in Music Mode.

In order to display album image, the image has to be stored in the ID3 tag of the music file. You can edit the ID3 tags using COWON MediaCenter - JetAudio. A JPG image file with the same name as the relevant music file should be stored in the player. Alternatively, a JPG image file named “cover.jpg” can be stored in the relevant folder.

No mention of standard or progressive, nor how large the JPG image can be. Certainly doesn't suggest that PNG or GIF or BMP is also supported for album art.

[foosnark]

The ID3 specification itself calls for PNG and JPEG to be supported. No wonder those images worked in everything else.

Ah well, in the effort to make this work, my library is now clean and well-organized, devoid of all the weirdness that Zune and Songbird inflicted on it, and there are no more 1.5 MB PNGs.

[mutescream]

Ok, after spending pretty much all day retagging all of my music, and redoing all of the album art... I have one frustrating issue. I have a few albums in ogg format, and I cannot get album art to work with them (I tried all of the stuff I did to get cover art to work with mp3 and flac files).

Is this just an issue with ogg in general, or are there things I should be checking? I used the search through amazon where I could (mp3tag), and google images searches otherwise. I tried dozens of images with each. No luck.

[Enzyme]

i also have what i believe to be perfectly clean tagged ogg's that dont display the art, but ive been too lazy to find the cause, also still missing tags on files despite having triple checked everything is in order, wondering if it's a firmware issue and that we should be using id3v1 instead of the newer one.
obviously if

The ID3 specification itself calls for PNG and JPEG to be supported.

and the j3 does not support png, there is the glaringly obvious issue that the j3 does not fully support id3.

[mutescream]

I went looking around... Apparently it's an ogg thing... From what I was able to find, no player can display cover art for ogg files. It was less big of a deal with my old player (which had cover art issues in general),

But with a touch screen player that allows you to switch albums based on album art for recognition... I guess I will finally abandon ogg files. They were an interesting novelty, but not enough of a benefit to justify the greater storage space over v0 and lose cover art to boot.

[el maco]

I've got the "cover.jpg" inside each album folder and I see the album art every time, even with ogg files. Just sayin'...

[mutescream]

hm. I'll have to check that out, then. Apparently embedded cover art doesn't work with ogg, at least.

[JSWolf]

All embedded cover art does is make your music files larger. There is no real benefit. But using cover.jpg means you don't bloat the music files and you still get cover art.