Ok, I bought SanDisk Clip Sport, 4-GB model this past Christmas(of 2014).
Early on, I’d copied a few artist’s songs and album name info across, and I DID see the album’s
cover picture, etc.
Later, I used Windows “Media Player” to rip some more music album tracks into my library collection.
So, I cleared out the whole ‘Music’ folder on the Clip Sport and again copied the whole collection tree
from Windows into the now-empty music folder on ClipSport. This time NONE of the album cover-art
showed up. Instead of the pictures of the covers, I had blank window, except for name of album and
song at very bottom of the window.
Of course, I was in total ‘mumble-mode’…I had no idea what was wrong.
But now, six months larter, I was playing around with some more new content, and stumbled upon
what I had done differently. Turned out that MY PROBLEM was in my copy-across method. But, I’ve
learned there are probably other issues that can bite you in other scenarios.
So, bottom line, here’s a few do’s and dont’s and gotchas to watch out for.
I’ve been using Media Player on Windows (Win-7 and Win-8.1) to do the RipCD operations.
I didn’t notice anything that can really go wrong there, to cause the needed ‘album art’ stuff to
NOT get generated. But, there’s tricks to being able to SEE whether those files are in fact there.
I’m sure there’s probably some way in the GUI (File Manager) on Windows to see these ‘hidden files’
that contain album art. But, since I use the cmd-line alot instead of the GUI, I look for them using
a cmd-window. So, if you navigate into you Music library on your PC and go down into one
of the album name directories that contain the actual MP3 music tracks, and do just a ‘DIR’
cmd, you will see ONLY the music tracks for that album, but will NOT see the album art files.
so, do the cmd “dir /a” (which means show ALL files) and you should see a handful of files
of ‘meta-data’ that contains the cover-art and related stuff.
My second issue is that, again, there is either the GUI or the cmd-line’s XCOPY cmd, as
choices for how to copy the whole directory trees from your PC to the Clip Sport.
In this case, I recommend the GUI to do the actual copy. (There is probably a switch
or something in XCOPY that will copy even the hidden files across, but clearly what
was happening to me, is that ONLY the track files were getting copied and NOT the
album meta-data files.
So, in the GUI, here’s how I navigate and click to do my GUI-copy. I start with
a completely empty MUSIC directory on the ClipSport (I clean it out entirely and copy my whole
music library each time, rather than copy incrementally when I rip a few new albums.)
So, in the GUI, I navigate into the MyMusic or Music folder (or whatever you have)
on the PC side, where I will see a whole series of ARTIST NAMES folders. So, now hit
the ‘CNTRL-A’ key-combo, which will SELECT all those directories/folders of all your
artists. Then, you can hit 'CNTRL-C (or choose ‘Copy’ from the right-click popup-menu)
CNTRL-C is same…says to ‘copy’ that whole list of directories into Window’s virtual clip-board.
So, now navigate to your drive on the ClipSport side (e.g. E:drive or F:drive or whatever
your ClipSport mounts as.) Go into its Music folder, which would show as ‘empty’.
Simply press the CNTRL-V (or do the equivalent right-click and choose ‘Paste’),
and you should see all those directory/folder trees appear in the ClipSport’s Music folder.
The album covers should NOW show up, when you play songs on the ClipSport.
You can VERIFY that the album meta-data is over on the ClipSport side, by
navigatng into any of the album directories using the cmd-line window, as
you did before, and do a ‘dir /a’ cmd, and should see both the track files
and the meta-data album cover files. (If they’re there, then the Album covers
should be showing up as you play your tunes.)
Hope this helps someone. (Since I had trouble with this stuff initially, I’m
sure a number of you others have run into this issue, too.)
Cheers…
