Album Art on Clip Zip?

Has anyone found a foolproof method for guaranteeing that album art shows up on the Zip?  I can’t seem to figure out what it is that makes some album art show up and not others.  Tagging art in Media Monkey doesn’t even guarantee it will display properly. 

@glove4 wrote:

Has anyone found a foolproof method for guaranteeing that album art shows up on the Zip?  I can’t seem to figure out what it is that makes some album art show up and not others.  Tagging art in Media Monkey doesn’t even guarantee it will display properly. 

It’s related to filesize of the image, I think. When I looked at one band’s 3 albums that are on my Zip, in MP3Tag, the two that show up had filesizes of 47kb and 53kb…the third one, that didn’t show, was over 200kb.

Is it file  size, or image dimensions?  Why doesn’t Sandisk list the limitations in the instruction manual?

@jk98 wrote:

Is it file  size, or image dimensions?  Why doesn’t Sandisk list the limitations in the instruction manual?

 

It seems to be size.

The three albums I mentioned in my prior post, here’s more detailed info (I found where I had posted it previously) …

2 of them are 500x500, but the filesizes are 31KB and 53KB…they show up on the CZ.  The 3rd album is 495x495, but the filesize is 247KB…that one doesn’t show. 

File size is the reason as stated previously.  AND, I found that an over 20k or there abouts image size also causes some minor pauses between track changes.  What you’ll hear is a pretty close to gapless playback become a noticeable gap if you get in the 50k range of image or larger.  The CZ has such a small image view a 20k image is good enough if not overkill.  On my iPhone 4 a 20k image is plenty and it’s screen is much larger and vastly higher resolution.

Also, be sure to update to the latest firmware released today.  Without it you’ll hear a nasty burst of static between track changes if you have embedded images.

the limit is file size. Album art is limited to 100KB. resolution is not an issue. 

Darn. A limit to file size. My Fuze+ never had such a limitation.

100KB is not a bad limitation.  In MP3Tag, my album art that’s 600x600 is about 50KB.  So with a 100KB limitation, the art can be over 1000x1000, which is very large.

@sansauserlba wrote:

Darn. A limit to file size. My Fuze+ never had such a limitation.

No, it has other issues. :stuck_out_tongue:

Tapeworm wrote:

 

No, it has other issues. :stuck_out_tongue:

:smileyvery-happy:  Thanks.   :smileyvery-happy: 

@drlucky wrote:

the limit is file size. Album art is limited to 100KB. resolution is not an issue. 

Thanks for the dope–very good to know.

@miikerman wrote:


@drlucky wrote:

the limit is file size. Album art is limited to 100KB. resolution is not an issue. 


Thanks for the dope --very good to know.

Is there something going on here we should know about? :stuck_out_tongue::wink::smileyvery-happy:

Now, now, now, just because SanDisk is located in Northern California . . . .   :wink:

Does album art have to be embedded into the music file or are there other methods such as having cover.jpg or folder.jpg in the same subdir as the music file?

UPDATE: figured it out.  The answer is: folder.jpg in the subdirectory of the album’s folder

@tonybigs wrote:

Does album art have to be embedded into the music file or are there other methods such as having cover.jpg or folder.jpg in the same subdir as the music file?

 

UPDATE: figured it out.  The answer is: folder.jpg in the subdirectory of the album’s folder

Naming the image file “album art.jpg” also works.

1 Like

Thank you!

Coming from the Rockbox world, I had all my cover art files named: cover.jpg

All my album art shows up…except for one Smiths album…

But I’m not about to mess with my files just to get it to show on the Zip…

@dreameight wrote:

All my album art shows up…except for one Smiths album…

 

But I’m not about to mess with my files just to get it to show on the Zip…

Same here.  I’ll only go so far in tweaking my files for a single player.

If it’s just one album on your Zip, just add the album jpg to the folder.  That doesn’t modify anything on your music files, but it does  give the Clip Zip an image to display.

Of course, once your original music files are standardized with ID3 v2.3 tags, they’re good to go on most any player out there.  The Zip recognizes both the embedded image as well as a solo jpg album art image, so either route will work.

Bob  :smileyvery-happy:

Just wanted to add a peculiar related problem, and my solution. Not sure if anyone else has encountered this problem or not…

I was able to see album art when viewing the albums in Windows Media Player. The instructions that come with the Clip Zip even tell you to use WMP for getting album art. However, when I copied the album folder to my player, the album art was not present.

I followed the instructions earlier in this thread to manually insert folder.jpg into the folder by saving it directly off the internet, however I was met with an error message. The file already existed! This was surprising because it was not visible in the list of files in the folder. And furthermore, when I tried to overwrite it, it told me I did not have privileges to do so, despite that I’m the administrator!

Here’s what’s going on. If you use the default location in Windows to store music, My Documents > My Music, all folders containing mp3 files will be given a system-level folder.jpg by WMP that you cannot see unless you right-click the folder, choose “properties”, and then click the Customization tab. The file is there but it’s a special system file, even though it’s just a jpg. When you copy the folder to the mp3 player, it does not copy this file. To make matters worse, all folders in My Music are a special type of read-only. You will see that read-only is checked with a grey check. It will re-check automatically if you uncheck it. This type of read-only folder allows you to delete the folder, rename it, delete and edit the visible contents, but you cannot change certain system properties, including trying to place a non-special folder.jpg into that folder.

The solution is to copy the album normally, and then separately copy an image file you want to use from somewhere else on your computer directly into the album folder in the player.