Album Art issues with MP3s - embedded or seprate files

MP3 players All other MP3 players
1

I just got a refurb 8GB Fuze+ and am so far pretty happy with it. However, I’m running into a frustrating and unreliable issue regarding album art.

I’ve used MP3Tag to embed album art in all the tracks I’ve put on the device. When I read that the particulars of the JPEG format could cause problems if not set correctly, I recreated the album art for every album manually, saving as a non-progressive sRGB JPEG file at 300x300px.

This worked for a number of albums. However, for some, it’s just not working correctly. For instance, I have three soundtracks from the Katamari Damacy games, and while the album art displays for almost all the tracks, it doesn’t display for the first track in each album, which means that the album art doesn’t show up at all when browsing by album.

I’ve tried putting the album art in the album directory, named cover.jpg, album art.jpg, and folder.jpg. Nothing seems to work for certain albums.

Is there definitive information on making compatible album art without using Windows Media Player?

2

I have never got album art to show properly, or consistently in any of my Sansas. You will find several threads here giving suggestions as to exact image size (different depending on model), bit-depth, in folder, in mp3 data, what the file should be specifically named, and more, and precisely NONE of the suggestions have ever worked.

Simple solution for me was to switch to ROCKBOX on the Sansa(s). No fiddling with images and it fiixed a host of other issues, super-sensitive touchpad being major culprit on the Fuze+.

www.rockbox.org

3

Thank you for the suggestion. I’ve seen RockBox recommended before, but I like the built-in firmware, surprisingly enough!

Unfortunate that there’s no reliable way to get the album art. :frowning:

4

Sometimes, the player doesn’t realize that certain files have changed, it only realizes if files have been added/removed. Perhaps that’s what is happening here; you added the files with “bad” album art (eg. progressive JPEG’s), fixed the issue, but the player refuses to take a second look at the files. Or, perhaps you transfered files without embeded AA, then embedded the AA later (again, the player won’t take a second look). However, I’ve found a few workarounds that might help:

  1. I would recommend you recopy your files in MTP mode (System Settings > USB Mode), as changes are alwalys recognized in this mode. This is probably the second easiest workaround you could use in this instance. If you’ve already been using MTP, odds are, this isn’t your issue, so none of these workarounds will help.:cry:

  2. You could remove the files, disconnect, wait for a DB refresh, reconnect, and re-transfer. Be warned that this might take a huge amount of time.

  3. You could rename either the files that are not being updated, or the folder they are stored in. If you have AA’s that aren’t embedded (such as folder.jpg files), you will probably need to rename them after a DB refresh, much like in step 2.

  4. You could delete all of the *.dat files from the Root Directory (this can only be done in MSC mode; it will not work in MTP mode), disconnect, and let the player rebuild it’s library from scratch. Don’t be too surprised if the player takes much longer to rebuild it DB than usuall, as it’s now doing so from scratch.

  5. Rockbox. If you’re willing to try it, it will probably prove to be the easiest workaround period.