Sluggish at moving to next track--one fix

I just had this problem with an album from a friend’s hard drive. 

When I pushed the << or >> button, it just sat there for long seconds and sometimes didn’t change to the next track at all.

I had already run the tags through my usual mp3tag , ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 (and virus-checker too) so that wasn’t the problem. However, there was an image in each of the files that the basic mp3tag view didn’t show.

I took a closer look. Under View in mp3tag you can switch from the usual Tag Panel to Extended Tags. (You have to highlight the files.)

It turned out each file had a pretty big copy of the album cover in it. If you do see the album cover, there are icons to the right. You can Extract it–which puts one image of the cover in the folder as folder.jpg, which the Fuze should display–and then hit the X icon and delete the cover from all the individual files.

Anyway if  you’re experiencing long gaps in playback on a particular album, and the Fuze just seems sluggish, look for those imbedded images.  It’s worth a try.

Some people are obsessive about high-res embedded art, and have huge images like you describe…I don’t use more than 500x500, and usually, I prefer 300x300, although sometimes I’m too lazy to resize down to that. Your friend should really resize and then re-embed his images.

For a device with a screen resolution of 176 x 224, and that doesn’t even display album art images at its full screen size, it’s completely idiotic to save your cover art at anything larger than 300 x 300. You can almost always find album art via Google Images in this (more-or-less) size.

Think aboout this; your Fuze (or any mp3 player for that matter) has to re-size that humungous image in order to display it. Not only does this over-tax the teeny brains (processors) of these devices, but have you ever resized a large image in a photo-editing program (Photoshop, Paint Shop, Gimp, Photoscape, etc.) into something smaller? How did it look? Pretty crappy & pixelated. You just can’t jam all the same ‘information’ from a large image into something the size of a postage stamp. It just ain’t all gonna fit.

Anything more than 300 x 300 pixel album art is simply a waste of valuable memory space and as you have discovered BR, can even cause seemingly un-related problems with performance.

@tapeworm wrote:

For a device with a screen resolution of 176 x 224, and that doesn’t even display album art images at its full screen size, it’s completely idiotic to save your cover art at anything larger than 300 x 300. You can almost always find album art via Google Images in this (more-or-less) size.

 

Think aboout this; your Fuze (or any mp3 player for that matter) has to re-size that humungous image in order to display it. Not only does this over-tax the teeny brains (processors) of these devices, but have you ever resized a large image in a photo-editing program (Photoshop, Paint Shop, Gimp, Photoscape, etc.) into something smaller? How did it look? Pretty crappy & pixelated. You just can’t jam all the same ‘information’ from a large image into something the size of a postage stamp. It just ain’t all gonna fit.

 

Anything more than 300 x 300 pixel album art is simply a waste of valuable memory space and as you have discovered BR, can even cause seemingly un-related problems with performance.

Actually, yes…I resize those images all the time.:stuck_out_tongue: How do you think you find those smaller images online? Somebody resized them…:wink:



Some would say that going up to 500x500 is future-proofing, for later players ( I’m not obsessed with album art, so I wouldn’t bother future-proofing it ), and some argue that that want the bigger art for when they listen on the computer ( I find that premise silly…if I am listening on the computer, Mediamonkey or Foobar is minimized anyways ).


But yes, with the Fuze, no point to using more than 300x300.

Just throwing this out; even with players/devices that have large screens, even 275x275 yields surprisingly good results.  I’m still embedding at that resolution, and have no urgent desire to increase the resolution.  At first when I started accumulating players with 3" or more displays, I thought I would have to increase; but all the players I own show the album art just fine at 275x275.