Sansa Clip Zip - Album art format

I’ve found that most of the time the Amazon images can be even 500x500 and still work fine because their filesize is under the 100kb limit. I embed, though…with the variety of players I have and have had, it’s the best all-around solution for my particular needs.

I think what he’s asking is:

What’s the best format for the image to be in so it doesn’t look all washed out?

@color43 wrote:

I think what he’s asking is:

 

What’s the best format for the image to be in so it doesn’t look all washed out?

If that’s the case, he may be disappointed. The color OLED screen in the Zip is not that crisp and/or colorful. It’s also a little grainy-looking. Sorry, but it don’t get any better than that.

Personally, I’d rather have no album art (like on the Clip+) than the washed-out, grainy rendition of it on the Zip’s screen.

Wow. SanDisk keeps making the Clip better and better and you complain about the resolution on a screen that measures less than one inch across? For those of us who had to edit our own tags just to make the m200 series run properly, this is pretty comical. But I guess I can understand.

:wink:

Some of my embedded art works fine, some doesn’t. That which doesn’t, I just save a jpg as “folder.jpg” as mentioned above. The artwork is readily available from Amazon or Wikipedia or, better still, Allmusic…the saved files there weigh in at about 8 kb, which is miniscule, and they still render pretty well. Try that…it works for me.

I downsized the embedded art work… and it still does not show in the Clip Zip

Does anyone have a idea what could be the reason for this odd behaviour?

thankx…

@exus98 wrote:

I downsized the embedded art work… and it still does not show in the Clip Zip

 

Does anyone have a idea what could be the reason for this odd behaviour?

 

Are the images plain 'ol .jpg and not progressive, pro or any of that nonsense?

I found some of my album art failed to show because although the file size was correct 96x96 pixels the resolution was very high making the file size large. I now make my images 72x72 ppi resolution 96x96 pixels in size which make the file size about 10kb. I name the file folder.jpg and store it in the same folder as song(s). I don’t embed the album art and remove any that is already there.

I have sometimes problems with the album art. When I move some songs from PC to Zip via USB and after I remove the USB cable a lot of album arts are not shown. I turn off the Zip and after a few seconds I turn on the Zip and I can see the album arts again. 

I have a “various artists” folder with the Ronettes and other Spector groups. The six Ronettes songs have all the same album art but I can see only from five of the six songs the album art. The song “(The Best Part Of) Breaking Up” has the same album art as the other songs but the album art is not shown. Could this I problem of the song title with special characters () ?

I have a folder with songs from an artist. The album arts has 500x500 pixel and 67 kb. But the album art is not shown:

http://www.picfront.de/d/8sQd

http://www.picfront.de/d/8sQe 

@john22 wrote:

I have a “various artists” folder with the Ronettes and other Spector groups. The six Ronettes songs have all the same album art but I can see only from five of the six songs the album art. The song “(The Best Part Of) Breaking Up” has the same album art as the other songs but the album art is not shown. Could this I problem of the song title with special characters () ?

 

The problem were not the special characters. The problem was the long album title which I have truncated to three words.

I managed to find and name an album picture for a group (300x300 pixels)  as ‘folder.jpg’, and transferred it to my Sansa Zip Clip, but i then had this picture for ALL of my tracks!

As this is new to me, i’d really appreciate some ‘step-by-step’ instructions on how to save the .jpg picture to my device so that i get the correct album art for EACH track, and not the SAME picture for ALL tracks.

Hope someone can help!

Thanks in advance

@smasher wrote:

I managed to find and name an album picture for a group (300x300 pixels)  as ‘folder.jpg’, and transferred it to my Sansa Zip Clip, but i then had this picture for ALL of my tracks!

 

As this is new to me, i’d really appreciate some ‘step-by-step’ instructions on how to save the .jpg picture to my device so that i get the correct album art for EACH track, and not the SAME picture for ALL tracks.

 

Hope someone can help!

 

Thanks in advance

Where did you place the folder.jpg file? It should be in the Album folder alongside the song files for the particular album you want your Zip to display the image for.

This assumes of course that you have a typical folder hierarchy of Artist [folder] > Album [folder] > Song files.

I placed the folder.jpg straight into the general folder ‘ALBUM’ on my  Sansa, so that was the problem now i think, after reading your advice. I’ll now try to put it alongside the song file for each song.

Thanks very much for your help & have a good weekend!

@smasher wrote:

I placed the folder.jpg straight into the general folder ‘ALBUM’ on my  Sansa, so that was the problem . . .

Yes, it was. I believe if you use MTP mode (on your player) and WMP to sync files, WMP will put in a general or main Albums folder which can be confusing. I don’t remember this exactly, as it is one of the reasons I quit using WMP and MTP mode years ago.

@smasher wrote:

 I’ll now try to put it alongside the song file for each song.

 

This isn’t exactly what I meant. Your folder/file heirarchy should be

Music [Main folder]

  - Artist [folder]

     - - Album [folder] (may be multiple albums for each artist)

          - - - Track #1.mp3, Track #2.mp3, Track #3.mp3 and so on [files] Put one folder.jpg (album art.jpg will also work) in this album folder along with the track or song (.mp3) files

You don’t need an image file for each track. Alternatively though, you can ‘embed’ the image in each track’s ID3 file, but that’s a lot more work, takes up more memory space (although small) and in my opinion a waste.

Thanks again… i’ll have a look at this tomorrow, and see where i went wrong. Thanks again for your help… it’s much appreciated!

About embedding files into the ID3 tag, I used embedding for Time-Life CD’s that have numberous artists, each having its’ own cover.  By modifying the tags each song can be part of the Time-Life CD while having independent artwork.

I was pulling my hair out with a similar problem.  No matter what format or resolution  artwork I used, it would not display in one folder, while similar settings worked fine in another folder.   It turned out that Win-7, was generating its’ own folder artwork (for doing previews,etc.). Afterwards anything I was putting in the file was ignored.  Attempting to rename a .jpg file to Folder.jpg, I discovered there already was such a file (although hidden), so I was not allowed that name.

Turning on ‘view hidden system folders’ allowed me to delete the Win-7 system ‘folder.jpg’ file, at which time the intended file could be renamed and then worked fine. 

Also, regarding size; I have successfully displayed a file that was right around 697KB, although it would take about 5 seconds to actually display.  Going down to 100K did eliminate that delay.

I’m using Ubuntu 13.10 (64-bit) Linux on my desktop PC.

I already have a /Music directory with my music in .ogg format, under artist and then album. Each directory also has an 600 x 600 pixel albumart.jpg file. This structure can be copied to any Android tablet or smartphone (as is).

To use with (one of) my Sansa Clip Zip 8GB device(s), I used the following simple conversion command:

    cd Music

    find . -type f -name ‘albumart.jpg’ -execdir convert -resize 96X96! albumart.jpg folder.jpg ;

This gives a nice 96 x 96 render of the Album art on the 1.1" display. The image file is typically under 5kB, with the occasional (< 2%) 30-40kB. I don’t even need to remove the albumart.jpg file, as it is ignored by Clip Zip.

The album art looks pretty aweful to me, also some jpgs just refuse to work, so I’ve resorted to just using a 1x1 pixel black jpg which streaches to replace the ugly non artwork patterened background, it actually makes the screen a lot more readable.

Like me if you are using your own jpg art work; to get jpgs to display on this small screen; in your chosen software to produce your logos, artwork etc  when saving / exporting to jpg - always tick the box that says: ‘Save Exif Data’

Then I use ‘Media Monkey’ to add the jpg artwork directly to my mp3.

Problem solved for me :slight_smile: plus for the size of screen they look good :slight_smile:

Hope this helps?

ps. Just done some more testing; 100kbs seems to be the maximum file size.