I just recieved my Clip Sport about a week two weeks ago and found there is a problem.
I had made my own album art for all my songs in my music library. These images show up fine in iTunes. These are simply 480 by 480 .jpeg images I made in PSP-X6. There have white lettering with different colored backgrounds on them. The lettering represents the year the song was made.
I found that when I added my songs to the Clip Sport the programming would get hung up on loaded most of the album art. The music would play fine, but while the Clip Sport is trying to load the image nothing else would work. Eventually the Clip Sport would give up trying to load the image and load a blank image. The weird part is that a few images would appear and work like they should.
I tried different picture file types and even making smaller album art but the Clip Sport gave me the same results each time. I eventually found that to get the Clip Sport to work right I need to remove the album art all together. I really don’t want to do this since I have well over 1600 songs in my library.
Question #1-Does anybody know what the possible problem is here?
Question #2-Is the Clip Sport bad and need replaced?
Can you provide an example file? eg. load to ImageShack (or equiv.) It is likely to be the layering and complexity of the images, and is probably fixable.
Here are 4 sample files. The pictures 2010 and 2007 are the only pictures that showed up. The 2005 and 2008 did not. I have no idea what the difference is between them as there were all made at the same time.
With a fresh start today I tried making new album art. I made 4 imagaes at 100 X 100. Two of them showed up normal normal while 2 showed up smaller with a black line across the bottom of them. Then I tried bigger picture at the max size of 480 by 480. Again two showed up normal with the other two didn’t show up at all. There seems to be no reason for this. All my testings seems to have the same mixed results. I can only be lead to believe that this product wasn’t tested enough before it was sold to the public. I’m heading of to the place that I bought this thing to give it a bad review. I should of never bought it!
I did read your post and you have an interesting find there. The difference with my issue is that all the pictures (album art) is being made in the same place at the same time but they get different results in the Clip Sport. I’m getting ready to make another set of pictures and giving it another try. Is there a suggested picture file type I should use?
I had similar problems when making album art for my mp3s on the Clip Zip. I found that if I follow three rules problem solved.
1: I make sure that the picture is square (which it sounds like you are doing)
2: I like to use JPEG (though I’ve noticed other formates seem to work fine as well, but I just like to keep a standard)
3: The file has to be under 20kb, which it looks like you are a bit over. Even if the pictures are all the same “size” (480x480 in your case), if you have a higher resolution it may get over that 20kb threshold, and therefore won’t show up.
This works for my Zip, and so far seems ok with my Sport too, but I’ve not played with it as much. May be a good place to start though.
I’ve got examples that work fine, and show as 82x82 images (on Clip Sport display), for a file as large as 83.6kB. I just scaled the images down (using ImageMagick v6.7) to 192x192 pixels, and file sizes shrunk (but not to below 20kB).
Note: Previously, I used the same technique for the Sansa Clip Zip, but scaled down to 128x128. When I saw the Clip Sport was available (with 128x128 OLED display, instead of 96x96 ), I changed to 192x192 , which still works fine on the Sansa Clip Zip.
Well, I resized all the pictures to 192 by 192 and none of them work. I think I wasted enough time on this…I can only assume that there is a problem with my Clip Sport. From this point on I’ll load them up without pictures.
I have downloaded your image file on a Clip Sport and the artwork is showing beautifully. The only thing you should need to do is to rename the file to folder.jpg and copy it to the desired Album folder on the player.
Thank you so much for the reply. I am glad to hear it worked for you.
Based upon your instructions, I think I may be misunderstanding how the album artwork files work here.
In the past, I simply had the artwork embedded in the mp3 file and it would show in the player. No need to place anything in an album art folder. This worked flawlessly on the Sansa Clip Zip. I’ve tested a file with this artwork and it plays fine and shows the embedded artwork not only on the Sans Clip Zop, but also in iTunes, Windows Media Player, Vox, VLC, player and all my Android music apps. Again, no need for a separate folder, just that mp3 file.
Embedded art is an alternative and works too. What software have you used to embed the artwork in the mp3-file you linked to? That one didn’t work “out of the box” but when i embedded the same artwork with VLC to your file it shows up in the Clip Sport just as it should.
Here is step by step instructions for Windows Media player:
Thanks so much for taking the time to look at this and reply so quickly. I guess my thread notifcations aren’t working because I never got a notice that anyone replied.
Anyway, if you are still able to pick up where we left off. I have been using iTunes (12.0.1.2.6). It usually embeds the artwork no problem when you add artwork manually (not auto-downloaded from the iTunes store), but I also used the Doug’s Apple scriptto embed the artwork as an extra step. It has always worked fine in the past with all the Sansa stuff. I’m not sure what is different now.
Choose version 2.3 in the droplist. It’s possible to select multiple tracks at once if you want to speed up the process.
I have downloaded your track, imported it into iTunes 12 , converted the tag version to ID3v2.3 and copied it to the Sport and it seems to work OK. To verify the ID3 Tag version for a track select “Get Info” in the menu.
BAM! That worked! I used 2.3. I thought it might be something about the ID3 tag version, but I could not find any documentation saying what the ClipSport prefered.
Thanks so much for your help. This has officially been solved!
