S639F - albumart and itunes

[Teun_2]

Hi all!

I've purchased this player yesterday and installed content transfer 1.31 with it. I use itunes as my media player and was able to easily drag and drop my songs (al ripped from cd's at 256kbit aac) from itunes to the player. Album art has also been transferred, but only for the albums for which itunes downloaded the cover itself. The albumart for the albums who's art i added myself do not appear on the player's screen. Is there an way to resolve this minor issue? I've searched the internet and this forum, but i cannot find anyone with the same issue. I use win 7 64bit, most recent version of itunes and already installed the firmware update.

Any help would be greatly appriciated!

[CrowdAds]

[Teun_2]

I fixed some albums! According to mp3tag tha album artist was missing for some albums, which is strange, given they all were ripped by itunes in the same manner. Setting the tags solved the issue for some albums, but not all.

[Teun_2]

The albums of which the art is missing do show the art in the mp3tag-program, while the ones that do maintain their art don't. Any suggestions?

edit: I've just found the edit button! Sorry for the too many quick answers. It seems that itunes stores its art from the apple database somwhere else and puts the art you added yourself in the id3-tag. Makes sense...(not!).

The sony software only copies the art not in the id3 tag, when dragged and dropped directly from itunes and ignores the id3tags.

So the question: how to put the art from the tags to the usual itunes location?

[lestatar]

Teun_2: Welcome and congrats.

Seems you are doing a bang up job solving the issue all on your own

I really have no useful experience with iTunes as I detest the product from previous encounters. Your issue here appears to be yet another indication of Apple's monoculture with iTunes, forcing users to adhere to their way of doing things rather than utilizing more universally accepted standards.

Cannot help you with the iTunes portion - can only suggest the most tedious thing. Use mp3tag to wipe clean and retag stuff, including embedding album art. iTunes can read mp3 metatag info properly, without adding any proprietary limits.

Do this for a few test albums. Once you determine this indeed solves all your tagging/art issues on the Sony S639, then you can formulate a plan of attack to fix everything else.

Don't have anything else to suggest, I am afraid. Perhaps others can be more useful.

cheers,
-les

[Teun_2]

That's the strange part of it, the songs which are correctly tagged by mp3tag do not show the album art on the player! Even when dragging these songs from the explorer, the album art is not being displayed. It's the iTunes way of doing which gives me the art.

Regarding itunes: i've installed it because i previously owned an ipod, which stopped working last week (after much abuse I must add). It has been a great player in sturdyness, useabillity, but the soundquality was lacking, i therefore moved away from apple's players. It wasn't bad, but was no match for my old zen touch (which even the sony can't match in clarity ). I kind of like itunes for it's simplicity, low button count and as long as you have an ipod, it's fabulous to use. So, if I could fix this with iTunes, I'll be great, but installing another player (as long it's not WMP) might also be an option.

Thanks for your suggestion, I might try that.

My apoligies for my possible faulty english grammar and spelling, it's my third language.

edit: solution found!

I've noticed that the album art is saved as png, converting them to jpg fixes the problem. Now all I have to do is manually export the art of each of the non working albums, convert them to jpg en reimport them into the id3 tag. Quite a bit of work, though.

[lestatar]

Teun: Nice! Glad to hear you found a solution. Guess we should start nagging manufacturers to begin support of PNG albumArt files, embedded and as folder/cover.png.

The png format has gotten a lot of traction in recent times and works great for certain image types.

Yes, a lot of work for you as you have everything embedded. You will need to use something like mp3tag to save all the embedded art, convert from png to jpg, then re-embed via mp3tag/whatever.

This instance is one case where the folder/cover.jpg method would be easier. You could batch convert the png files to jpg in basically one shot using any number of excellent, free image batch converters [I personally like Fastone]....

cheer!
-les

[skip252]

The Album Art Extractor for Rockbox works for me with non-iTunes encoded m4a files. It may work with yours. If your files are organized on a per folder basis it may be able you do a per folder extraction of jpgs at the size you designate.

Very fast with a intuitive GUI. It's also a free program so the price is right. Just a bit of skull sweat to get things set up right. Mp3Tag will extract your AA but it saves it in it's native format. The AA Extractor does bulk extraction and then saves the images to the same folder as the tunes.

Once you've extracted the artwork it's just a few clicks to have Mp3tag remove the png cover and embed the jpg cover. If you've got a fair size collection it may be worth trying.

[Teun_2]

Originally Posted by skip252

The Album Art Extractor for Rockbox works for me with non-iTunes encoded m4a files. It may work with yours. If your files are organized on a per folder basis it may be able you do a per folder extraction of jpgs at the size you designate.

Very fast with a intuitive GUI. It's also a free program so the price is right. Just a bit of skull sweat to get things set up right. Mp3Tag will extract your AA but it saves it in it's native format. The AA Extractor does bulk extraction and then saves the images to the same folder as the tunes.

Once you've extracted the artwork it's just a few clicks to have Mp3tag remove the png cover and embed the jpg cover. If you've got a fair size collection it may be worth trying.

Thanks for the tip! I've exagerated the count a bit. All in, there were still little under 20 albums out of +- 150 or so without artwork. For most I used MP3tag on the left hand side of the screen en google image search on the right hand side. Copy/paste did it for all but two cd's (demo's of local bands); for those i just exported the art and converted them with irfanview.

Thanks to both of you for your useful sugestions! Still enjoying the little player, it's just perfect for my use. (apart from this issue).

[skip252]

Glad it's all working for you. The s639 is one of my favorite players. Almost invisibly light and slim and this little rascal can crank out some great sounds for hours. Hope you enjoy yours for a good long time. I know I'm enjoying mine.

[Teun_2]

The sony will endure some very abusive use. I'll use the player mostly on the bike from en to the university, which is a +-45 min drive. I do not tend to be very cautious with my mp3players, so i hope it will last at least 2 years, the same as my nano did. That's my main concern with this player, the build quality is very decent, but nowhere near as good as that of the nano, which can be described as a block of metal. You must admit that apple's players are very well build, I wish the engineers at apple would put as many effort in sound quality as they put in design and build quality.

[skip252]

Actually they do. The iPodsound enhancements, those crappy EQ presets, aren't up to snuff but the tests say the base iPod SQ is as good as anyones. Things like the 5 band equalizer, ClearBass, VPT and the Dynamic Normalizer let most folks flavor the Sony sound more to their liking.

But RMAA tests say the base, volume matched SQ is as good as anyone's. I've done some very careful with listening some good headphones after matching the volumes and I can't find a way to argue with those tests.

[Teun_2]

It's indeed the equalizer i missed mostly on the ipod and also some 'crispyness'. I've done some listening on the new nano, which is bit better i think, but i am not sure, since it wasn't with my music. I don't know about any tests, but my experience tells me that sound quality is very subjective.

[lestatar]

lol.......I must be spending too much time here on ABi...Your suggestion of giving Album Art Extractor a shot was exactly what I was thinking as well... Unfortunately, my net access is sporadic right now in HK so I could not beat you to the punch. lol

Logically, I guess it should theoretically work in Teun_2's case though I think the only question is if the app will support png files and convert them to jpg.though it sounds like you did get it to work...

Teun_2, care to give that a shot and let us all know whether it works?

[Teun_2]

It's too late for that. Al the art has already been converted as I already wrote yesterday. Given the UI of album art extractor and the countless positive reviews of the app, i would say the app is capable of extracting .png and savinf as .jpg. There is a dialogbox in which you can set the output format.

[lestatar]

Originally Posted by Teun_2

It's too late for that. Al the art has already been converted as I already wrote yesterday. Given the UI of album art extractor and the countless positive reviews of the app, i would say the app is capable of extracting .png and savinf as .jpg. There is a dialogbox in which you can set the output format.

ah, sorry, i missed that...

you could always take one for the team, do a couple albums under iTunes to recreate the issue then test Album Art Extractor for png conversion ability to jpg.

all in the name of science of course...

[Teun_2]

Haha, okay, just because you've been helpful. I'll let you know later this weekend.

[skip252]

You can if you want but I've tested that before. It works for me. The only reason I specified "non-iTunes encoded m4a files" was that I don't have any that were done by iTunes since the last time I had it installed over three years ago.

It works extracts the .pngs and converts them to either .jpg or .bmp with no problems from the older files I have. It won't hurt to test with more recently encoded files but I don't think iTunes has changed it's tagging system.

[lestatar]

sweet guys...great info as always skip252! thanks