NWZ-765 and album art

[sony sam]

Hi

Just bought one of these (and well pleased with it), but wondered if there is a way to fill in the missing album covers for the wma files I transfered from my old mp3 player?. Been using 'Media Go' to rip some new albums, and the covers with those has made me want it for the older rips too.

thanks
sam

[CrowdAds]

[skip252]

If Media Go can't fetch and embed album art I'd look at another media library/transfer software. I only used MG for a fairly short time and was very frustrated by how slow it was and it's lack of intuitive interface.

A decent music library software like Musicbee will fetch album art as part of it's tagging process. It will do it while the files are on the player but that can be really slow. It's better to drag everything off, tag it with embedded album art and then put it back using either drag and drop or the MusicBee sync process.

MediaMonkey was the software I recommended for this until recently but it lost some of it's edge after the latest upgrade. It still does a decent job but moves slower now. Each can install in portable mode and won't interfere with the other if you decide to test them both.

You can just drag everything off and use a good quality tagger like Mp3tag to do the same thing for adding AA. It doesn't move the files on and off a Sony but some consider it a better tagger. I think they all do a decent job but if I were to recommend one now for all around use it would be MusicBee.

TBH I think foobar2000 beats all of them for most purposes but it doesn't do MTP transfer. That's needed for syncing a Sony. If you want to just drag and drop the files after foobar2000 tags them I'd look into that.

[sony sam]

Thanks Skip for a very thorough reply. Decided on using MP3Tag and just copying the files back to the player now. This stuff can get a bit OCD - even been touching a few poorer quality covers up first in photoshop

[skip252]

I know about the OCD part all too well. I went through that for a while until I realized that I only saw the image on the player for a few seconds at a time. The quality of the image I saw didn't much matter (to me!). Blurry and out of focus wasn't acceptable but I didn't need studio quality either.

I also found embedding places the image in each file and I lost quite a bit of music storage space for images I rarely saw. It didn't take long for me to find a compromise between size and quality. Losing a couple of albums to look at nicer AA for a few seconds wasn't worth it for me. You'll find your own sweet spot.

If you have the full Mp3tag install you may want to try the Amazon cover art plugin. If your albums are in it's database it can fetch some decent images. They usually are of high enough quality where photoshop may not be needed.

[dave_syd]

I had the problem of album art showing up fine in MediaGo but not showing up on my S764.

I tried using Mediamonkey and it worked fine with no fiddling around. The only problem with Mediamonkey is it took some settings changes to tidy it up a bit because the default settings are too cluttered for my tastes.

[Vilietha]

Hello, I have a related problem.

I use Linux and want to get Cover Art working on my NWZ-S764. There are several library managers available for Linux, but none seems to support Cover Art well. And with the few which do support it (I only found Easytag), it will not show up on the player.

I have transferred around 20 albums (folders) onto my player, and actually with two of them the album art shows up. However, I don't know which conditions it makes such that it shows up. It is not the filename, it must somehow be the ID3Tags of the mp3-files. But if add the album art of other albums to the ID3 tags, it still did not show up on the Sony mp3 player.

Does anyone know what the exact conditions it are which must be satisfied such that the cover art shows up? (Filenames, ID3-tags, sizes of images etc). If I know the conditions, I can do it manually.

I look forward to your answers,
Vilietha

[skip252]

Welcome to ABi

I embed .jpg images no larger than 500x500 pixels. They are also all under 96 kB. The images have to be baseline, not progressive. Progressive images will embed but won't show. As I mention earlier embedding places a copy of the image in each file so the larger an image is used the more storage space you lose for music.

I use Kid3 in Linux for album art embedding. I've used EasyTag in the past and it worked reliably to embed album art that worked on a Sony. If you prefer Easytag you may want to try again making sure your images fit the guidelines I posted.