Can't get album art to show on Fuze

Okay, I have searched the forums and have found several different threads on this but none seem to apply/work. I just recently got a Fuze and started adding songs from CDs. In the beginning, the album art seemed to work and would show up on the Fuze when the song was selected. Now, no album art shows up on any of them. I am using Media Monkey to do the transfers. The album art shows up on Media Monkey when showing the files on my hard drive. I have even deleted a particular album off the Fuze and then tried to simply drag and drop that album back on to the Fuze (from the hard drive where the album art showed) and no luck.

Any suggestions before I start hitting the bottle?

If the art shows in your music folder on the computer, and doesn’t show on the Fuze when you drag and drop the files,I don’t know…drag and drop was my solution to get the art to show up. What size are the art files? Generally 200x200 for the folder jpg and 75x75 for the mini list view jpg are what you need.

It appears that the album art must be embedded in the mp3 tag (I guess) because there is no separate art file, just the audio files on the hard drive. Does that make sense?

@hamillp wrote:
It appears that the album art must be embedded in the mp3 tag (I guess) because there is no separate art file, just the audio files on the hard drive. Does that make sense?

The embedded album art is a whole different scene. I have not delved into that at all. The seperate art files worked for me. If you use the “auto-tag from web” on MM, it will give you the choice, embed art in tracks, or add to folder, or save to tag and folder…that might fix things for you. :smiley:

I tried adding it to the folder and that did not work either. No folder was created and no file was created (with the artwork) either.

@hamillp wrote:
I tried adding it to the folder and that did not work either. No folder was created and no file was created (with the artwork) either.

If I remember correctly, this is more of a MM issue. You can access the same music different ways within Media Monkey. I haven’t used it to transfer music for a while. I found that for the Fuze, if I added the albums to the Windows Media Player 11 library, that WMP would add the seperate art files to the music folders accessible in My Computer/Windows Explorer…after that happened, I would drag and drop directly from there to the Fuze.

I don’t know how MM does things, but I do know that WMP creates a bunch of hidden album art files of different sizes, including a Folder.jpg that’s usually around 200 x 200. It also creates a bunch other hidden files like desktop.ini and Thumbs.db. Besides being a hidden file, it also makes the Folder.jpg file a system file.

I really hate to drag-n-drop music folders from the WMP My Music folder over onto my player(s) because of all the excess un-needed files that can end up going  along with the music files. And, since it makes the Folder.jpg file a system file, you can’t even change the hidden attribute under file properties. I have my own special old fashioned DOS trick for deleting all the other junk files and removing the hidden and system attributes of Folder.jpg (which is really the only album art file that needs to go onto the Fuze).

I’ve never had much use for imbedding the album art into the music files as a ID3 tag, but some people prefer it. To me having album art in every file is just wasting space and sometimes the Fuze stumbles when trying to play files with imbedded album art. So, I stick with just the Folder.jpg file. Of course, that also means the music has to be sorted out into proper album folders, but I’ve always had my music sorted Artist/Album/Title anyway.

Okay, when I go into the album folders on the Fuze, some have ALB files with the album cover which appears. Others do not have any ALB file and still others have an ALB file but it does not pop up as the album cover and I do not know what program I would need to use to view it. Any thoughts on this?

It should not be this difficult to get the album art to show up!!!

MP3Tag

Use it. It rocks.

When I try to use it to tag my Music folder on the Fuze, it cannot see the Fuze. Is that normal? Needless to say, that makes it much more complicated to actually use the program. If I move the Music folder from the Fuze to my harddrive and use mp3tag on that and then use the harddrive folder to replace the folder on the Fuze, should that work?

How exactly does one use mp3tag?

Here’s my album art experience…

My first player that supported album art was a Zen V+. I used it with Amarok on Linux, and I was happy. Amarok would fetch art from Amazon, embed it in the MP3 ID3v2.4 tag as it sent it to the player & the player would display it. I never had to look under the hood.

Then my Zen broke & I got a Sansa e260v2, and everthing stopped working. It was very fussy about what sort of tags it understood (not v2.4), and even when it understood the tags, it didn’t display embedded album art. I had to go through my entire library, making ‘folder.jpg’ files with the art in, max size 200x200, < 20kB. Even then, the art didn’t always display, and if the firmware really didn’t like something in a particular JPEG, the player would lock up…

Thankfully, later versions of firmware for both e2*0v2 & Fuze are a lot more robust. And the Fuze will handle embedded art. However, even with the latest version, there are still some jpegs that won’t display for me. If that happens, I just google for another & try that. And AFAIK, there is still a restriction on the size in pixels & kB of the JPEG, although none seems to know a hard figure for it.

So, what you can do with Mp3tag is extract your embedded art to folder.jpg, resize it to <200x200, <20kB (use Irfanview, or a bulk thumbnail generator), and either re-embed it, or just leave it in the album folder & copy it across to the player when you copy the album folder over.

Sorry, it’s a PITA…

Message Edited by daytona955 on 04-24-2009 01:27 AM

I will see what I can figure out with mp3tag. It is strange. I have set Media Monkey to “save image to album folder” yet when I try to auto tag it from the web and save it to the folder (which the program says it is doing without any problem) no file is created in the album folder. Very frustrating.

I have a similar situation. I was able to see the pre-installed music/art under songs and albums when I first got my Fuze. After formatting and adding music files I was not. I used MM to embed art, now works fine scrolling through songs, but unable to see any art while scrolling through albums still.

Thanks.

@hamillp wrote:
I will see what I can figure out with mp3tag. It is strange. I have set Media Monkey to “save image to album folder” yet when I try to auto tag it from the web and save it to the folder (which the program says it is doing without any problem) no file is created in the album folder. Very frustrating.

Have you tried accessing the music from different places within MM? There’s the location menu, then there is the artist menu, etc. Seems like one might work if the other doesn’t. ALso, maybe try Send to-> Folder Copy instead of instead of Synchronize?

Actually that is how I have always transferred the music (send). I have not attempted to synch it. Could that be the problem? I just tried to send from the Location folder instead of the Artist folder but that did not work either.

@hamillp wrote:
Actually that is how I have always transferred the music (send). I have not attempted to synch it. Could that be the problem? I just tried to send from the Location folder instead of the Artist folder but that did not work either.

Be careful if yuo try to synchronize…try to go in and set up options for it before you do it!

@marvin_martian wrote:


@hamillp wrote:
Actually that is how I have always transferred the music (send). I have not attempted to synch it. Could that be the problem? I just tried to send from the Location folder instead of the Artist folder but that did not work either.


Be careful if yuo try to synchronize…try to go in and set up options for it before you do it!

Because the synchronize , with any music manager, bei it MM, WMP, whatever, will just go nuts and sync everything and sometimes remove what’s on your player. You have to set them to “manual” sync instead of auto.

yeah, that is kind of why I have avoided trying to sync. Quite frankly it is just a PITA. If it works, however, it may be worth the hassle.

@hamillp wrote:
yeah, that is kind of why I have avoided trying to sync. Quite frankly it is just a PITA. If it works, however, it may be worth the hassle.

My suggestion from Page one works for me, although somebody objected to it…so I never put much thought into alternate methods, to be honest.