I own two C250 MP3 players which were purchased today at Best Buy. They each have the latest firmware (using the Sansa updater software). The first unit has firmware version 01.01.00P (version 1 hardware) and it correctly displays album art which is contained in a file named ‘Album Art.jpg’ in the associated music album folder. I have copied the exact same album folder into the second player, which has firmware version 03.02.05A (version 2 hardware), and it does NOT show any album art when the center button is pressed during a song. I have followed the Sansa video regarding adding album art to the C250. The process works on the first unit, but not on the second. Is this due to some change in the firmware or hardware version? I also tried renaming the file as ‘Folder.jpg’ but that didn’t work either. Any ideas as to what the problem is with the second unit?
Thanks for the advice. I did try Winamp Beta 5.5 and it works very nicely. It autotagged the album songs and embedded the album art into the mp3 file ID tags. It then sent the album folder over to the Sansa C250 music directory. The album plays fine, but the album art is still not working right. I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this particular C250. Perhaps the automatic firmware upgrade did not work 100% correctly or there is some file missing. I am having another problem with it now. The unit has completely frozen on me twice, and I had to remove the battery to reset. I am returning this C250 to Best Buy. I hope I get a version 1 hardware replacement. If not, I may skip the firmware upgrade until I am sure that it is not contributing to the problem.
What is the difference between version 1 and version 2 of the hardware? And how can you tell which you have? My c250, which is not very old, is 01.01.05P. And someone told me that was the latest firmware justa few weeks ago. It’s a bit jarring to hear that Sansa is already up to version 03.02.05A.
Anyway, my sansa ignores album art in the id3 tags (and I’m rather pleased that it does). To get album art displayed I had to use folder.jpg. Note the lower case f, Folder.jpg did not work. I did not get AlbumArt.jpg to work, but I did not try very hard (I don’t see a big need for several operational file names). Because the screen is 120 x 80, I tried an 80x80 jpg… did not work. I switched to a 250x250 and this worked fine. I have been meaning to go back and find the min size, but I have not done so yet. So check the size of the jpg and check the spelling of the file name.
I have to mention that, although I would not have accepted album art failing, now that I have it working, I no longer use it. It is cool, but only for a few minutes. The first time I ran out of space, the album art went.
I think that you can determine the hardware version based on the firmware version number. If you check http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=c200&thread.id=1 you will notice that hardware version 1 has a latest FW version of 01.01.00P (for the US) and hardware version 2 has a latest FW version of 03.02.05A. I exchanged my C250 for another unit at Best Buy today. This one is also a version 2, because its FW version is 03.01.14A. I am hesitant to upgrade the firmware again based on my previous experience. The bad news is that this unit also does not recognize the Album Art.jpg files which the version 1 hardware supports. I tried using Album Art.jpg, folder.jpg, and directly embedding the album art into the mp3 file ID tags. None of these methods worked on either of the C250 version 2 units, whereas the first method worked very successfully on two of the version 1 units. I’m using the exact same file spelling on both hardware versions. I’ll try playing with the image resolution next. If nothing works, I guess I can live without the album art.
I’m wondering if the newer Sansa C250’s switched to using .alb files for the album art? If I hover the mouse over one of the five .alb files in the C250 Albums folder, I can see the album art for the associated song. At least it works for the preprogrammed songs. I need to google search ‘ALB file’ and ‘album art’ to get some more info.
UPDATE: I was finally able to get the album art to display correctly on the C250 (version 2 hardware). First I deleted all of the albums that I had previously dragged into the C250 Music folder using Windows Explorer. I then used Windows Media Player (version 11) to load the desired albums and pasted the album art if it was missing. I finally sync’d to the C250. WMP automatically transferred the mp3 files and added the necessary .alb files to the C250 Albums folder (which apparently contain the album art info). The album art .jpg files were not included in the file transfers, but were apparently used in setting up the .alb files. If I hover the mouse over any of the .alb files within Windows Explorer, I can see the album art. And more important, I can now see the album art when I press the center button during a song.
Thanks for your help. I don’t know why the previous methods didn’t seem to work for version 2. I think I’ll skip the firmware update for now, since everything works.
