Album art so hard on a few albums Help Please

I have tried and tried and tried with some albums to get the album art to show up, but, I can not.

Here is what I do.  I use mp3 tag to clean up my tags.  Then I embed the album art by adding art manually or using the mp3tag utility.  Then I will extract the album art to the folder in a file named folder.jpg .  This has worked with about 97% of all my mp3s.  I have some music that will not show the art on the fuze.   But, when I go into mp3tag, the art shows there, also, I browse to the folders where the album is at and there is a file called folder.jpg and I view it and it shows the art just fine in a image browser.

To no avail, I can not get these few albums to show.  I delete the album art, redo it.  Delete the folder.jpg, then extract the cover and save it to folder.jpg.  Still nothing.

I know I have seen people ask this stuff before, and, I have followed every piece of advice or guidance so far on this, but still nothing.

Any other ideas I may be missing?

I really really appreciate any help.

Thanks in advance!!!= )

  1. Are you sure they are regular, ol’ white-bread variety .jpg format? ‘Progressive’ jpegs won’t work. You may want to open these problematic images up in an image-editing software program (Photoshop, Paint Shop, Photoscape, etc.) and re-save them in the normal .jpg format.

  2. What is the size of the images? There’s not reason to add anything over 300 x 300 pixels. in fact, if they’re too big, the player can choke and not display them.

  1. Are you sure they are regular, ol’ white-bread variety .jpg format? ‘Progressive’ jpegs won’t work. You may want to open these problematic images up in an image-editing software program (Photoshop, Paint Shop, Photoscape, etc.) and re-save them in the normal .jpg format. Also, check to make sure the images aren’t .bmp, .png or .gif. Sometimes the images you download are in these other formats, and you may not even notice.

  2. What is the size of the images? There’s not reason to add anything over 300 x 300 pixels. in fact, if they’re too big, the player can choke and not display them.

  1. I brought up the folder.jpg in paintshop and resampled them all to 200x200 and saved them as jpeg.  So I would say they are, but, I will double check. 

2.  as stated 200x200, but, I have others are that is 400x400 that displays just fine.  Just no rhyme or reason…

I will say, some of them now are showing up when playing music, but, still not showing up in the listing of the albums.

Thanks Tapeworm for the help!! I will look at the actual files again…

Well after some indepth research, I believe I found the problem.  I compared images I was using in other albums that where showing correctly and the one that where not.  What I found out was the dpi on the images not showing where higher, for example they were 300 dpi and the other images that where showing was 97 dpi. 

After some googling, I downloaded ifranview and resize/resampled the files to change the dpi to 97.  Then I went into mp3tag and removed the art work on those files.  I added the art back using the folder.jpg I edited to 97 dpi.  Copied over to the fuze, brought it up, and wholla, I have album artwork.

Thanks Tapeworm for pointing me to looking at the actual image files.

Hope this may help any others having issues.

Rather than start another new thread about this, I figured I should just add to this one.

I am STILL having terrible trouble adding album art to my Sansa Fuze. The suggestions about making sure that none of the images are “Progressive” Jpegs, and that they are all of a certain dpi have NOT worked.

I modified and edited every single one of my images using the same program (GIMP).

I made absolutely certain that every image is either 300x300 or 400x400 max (depending on the size of my source image), and that it is saved in .jpg format, and NOT “Progressive”.

I just completed a series of roughly 30 + album art images, collected from google searches and all modified and resized using the exact same procedure for each one, saving every image with the same attributes (excluding dpi), all as “folder.jpg” in the appropriate folder.  They all display properly by default on my PC in thumnail view.

… only about half of them worked on my Sansa Fuze.  The other half do not display.  Some of the full resolution versions on some of the album arts show up in the “Photos” section where I put them also … but the cropped squares of 400x400 don’t show up as the album art.

I looked up the attributes of those that are working and those that are not and there is NOT any clear distinction between them.  One .jpg that is 400x400 with 72 dpi works, and the other does not.  And yet, I have another 400x400 .jpg which has 200dpi, and that DOES display just fine.

… could someone who actually knows what is going wrong here and has a solution that actually WORKS help me figure out what to do to make my album art display?

(On a side note:  … why does Sandisk not list the well-known difficulties the device has with displaying album art under the “Known Issues” section of the current firmware?  This is most definately a “Known Issue”, and one I would like to see addressed.  If the firmware can not be fixed … a known software program that will make 100% compatable album art every time would be a good thing to link to somewhere.)

UPDATE:

Well … I just had the (seemingly) brilliant idea of using the Sandisk provided “Sansa Media Converter” program to convert all of the images I intended to use as album art first, and then apply them.

That … Failed … MISERABLY.

The conversion proccess turned all of the square images into 176x176 bitmap (.bmp) with a dpi of 199.

Strangely, though the files are viewable in the folder they were converted into, when I copied the files back onto my PC and then tried to re-copy them back onto the device exactly as the Media Converter made them (named either “folder” or any name), it gave me an error message saying it was an unsupported file format. 

… the Sansa Media Converter converted the files into an unsupported format???  (But they are intially fully viewable in that format)

It will not even allow me to RE-USE the files that it itself converted for it’s own optimized use.

Now I am even MORE confused than I was before.

HEEEEEELLLLLLPPPPPPPP!!!

I’m not trying to be a wise-acher here, but have you considered that Gimp is doing something to the images that the Sansa doesn’t like?

All I can tell you is that I’ve not had one single issue with album art with my Sansas since I started using the freeware program called Easy Thumbnails

I instuct the program to resize the input jpgs to 275x275 (a good setting for all my Sansas and non-Sansas alike) and just let Easy Thumbnails do the work.

I usually embed my newly created thumbnails into the files itself using  MP3Tag  while keeping the folder.jpg image in the album directory as well.

With the above procedures, I have yet to have an image that didn’t display properly.

UPDATE:

I went through the tiring process of converting all of the BMP’s (it turned out to actually be over 100 album images, and not just the 30 I thought) the Sansa media Converter created into JPGs, following the exact same procedure every time (using GIMP still, while saving .jpg, under “Advanced” settings, I UNchecked all options, including “Optimize”, and selected the smallest file size option in the drop down box, but 100 (max quality) on the compression slider) and they all worked.

I am NOT going to claim that saving a file with those settings will work every time … but it has worked so far (until it doesn’t).

I just wish I knew what specific file quirks the Sansa Fuze doesn’t like so much so I could simply make the right adjustments the first time when a particular file is being troublesome.

… and I prefer not to embed the album art.  Not only does it work even less often … but it inflates the filesizes uneccesarily.  Why have 20 copies of the same image in a 20 song album folder (I have as many as 300+ songs in some folders) when only one will do?

@vuldari wrote:

UPDATE:

 

I went through the tiring process of converting all of the BMP’s (it turned out to actually be over 100 album images, and not just the 30 I thought) the Sansa media Converter created into JPGs, following the exact same procedure every time (using GIMP still, while saving .jpg, under “Advanced” settings, I UNchecked all options, including “Optimize”, and selected the smallest file size option in the drop down box, but 100 (max quality) on the compression slider) and they all worked.

 

I am NOT going to claim that saving a file with those settings will work every time … but it has worked so far (until it doesn’t).

 

I just wish I knew what specific file quirks the Sansa Fuze doesn’t like so much so I could simply make the right adjustments the first time when a particular file is being troublesome.

 

 

… and I prefer not to embed the album art.  Not only does it work even less often … but it inflates the filesizes uneccesarily.  Why have 20 copies of the same image in a 20 song album folder (I have as many as 300+ songs in some folders) when only one will do?

You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble and aggravation by just using Easy Thumbnails; which DOES NOT require you to embed the album art.  But, it appears that you like tinkering around with this issue, so have fun.