Solutions for Album Art Problems

[ZenChick]

#5 on this list.

[CrowdAds]

[apoorva84]

i simply use wmp11 on my windows xp machine to sync my audio files...it works like a charm...

[LadyAngel]

Originally Posted by ZenChick

Okay, if you're concerned that the information in your ID3 tags might be correct or missing, you should run Creative's Auto Tag Cleaner (START --> All Programs --> Creative --> Creative Media Toolbox) across your entire library. It will analyze your songs and lookup the correct tags for them.

MP3 Tag Tools is a very robust mass tag editor, but it doesn't do lookups. Your best bet is to run all your songs through Creative's Auto Tag Cleaner to establish a baseline for all your tags. Once you do that, then you can open MP3 Tag Tools to the directory that contains all your songs, scroll down the list, and make any corrections necessary.

One thing to remember about MP3 Tag Tools: It's a mass tagger. While you can edit tags on an individual song, its greatest strength lies in its ability to edit large amounts of tags in one go. One example of how this is useful is when you have songs that you know all came off the same album. You can highlight all those songs, uncheck all tag fields except "album" (and perhaps year and genre), enter the correct name of that album, and all your highlighted tags get updated.

It also works this way with pictures (album art). If you have a bunch of songs from the same album, you can highlight all those songs, load the correct picture from wherever you have a copy of it, and all those songs will have the same album art embedded. To do this, you'll need to have an image already. The best place to go for album art images is Google's music search. Just type in the name of the artist and album, and Google should find the correct album for you, with a 90x90px image if one is available. Just right-click on that image, select "Save picture as...", and save it somewhere where you can easily find it again. Then, within MP3 Tag Tools, click the "Picture" tab just below the list of songs you've got; highlight all the songs that belong to that album, click "Load Picture", and point to where you saved your album art. Once the image shows up in the box, click "Write Tags", and you're done!

Some things to remember about ID3 Tags: There are two versions - v1 and v2. Both versions can (and often do) exist in the same music file. v1 tags are stored toward the beginning of the music file, and takes up a specific amount of space, regardless of what's in the tag; therefore, v1 has limits: 30 characters for Title, 30 characters for Artist, 30 for album, and a few for year, genre, and comments - for a total of 255 characters. This is too limiting for most tag information these days, so they've come up with v2 tags. v2 tags are appended to the end of your music file, so it doesn't have the field length limits that v1 has. It also allows for much, much more information to be embedded, such as information about the artist, the band, who composed the song, etc. etc. and etc. It also allows for embedding of lyrics and album art. Not all MP3 playing devices understand v2 tags, however, so the v1 tags are still there for that purpose.

Why is all that important? Because whenever you go editing tags, you're probably only editing either the v1 or the v2 tags, but not both at the same time. This causes your tags to be "out of sync", which can result in unexpected displays if you encounter a device that only reads v1 tags. Now, what I usually do is edit the v2 tags to my liking, then I use the "Copy V2 to V1" tool that most taggers have to copy my v2 tags to my v1 space. Why do I to v2 to v1, instead of v1 to v2? Remember what I said about v1 tags having length limits. If I have a song title that exceeds 30 characters, I won't be able to type the whole thing into a v1 tag; so, I type it into the v2 tag instead. When I copy v2 to v1, the v1 tags get filled in up to their limits. If I edited the v1 tag instead, then I'd have to copy the information into the v2 tag, then go into the v2 tag and fill in whatever wouldn't fit in the v1 tag. Big waste of time.

Have I confused the hell out of you yet?

Thanks for the tip! I started it almost three hours ago and now it's almost done. But how long it takes depends on you internetconnection, I have 2MB/s, not that fast. Haven't seen the tagresult yet but I'll trust you on that. The tags on 999 songs out of my 2900 songs was missing. None of the info existed on those 999, not even the tracks name...very annoying...
I sat all day yesterday, working my fingers to the bone with manually typing in all of the tag info. EXTREMELY boring and frustrating and my energy could only make me fix the tags on 90 of the 999songs. And I had to force myself to do that. And about 300 or 400 of the other songs I have had either incorrect or "half" tags.
I didn't even know that Creative had a "tagfixer" that I apparently installed together with the other software. In my emails to Creatives support regarding the easiest way to correct the tags, Creative told me to use the synch thing in Windows Media Player. The only thing that the synching did with my tracks was copying every single track so I had doubles of every song! So I re-formatted it to get rid of the damn copies. By the way, if someone has the demopics/originalwallpapers left, could you send it to me?? And now I won't transfer the tracks to the ZVM until I've dubblechecked that the tags are correct. I mean, how annoying isn't it when it says <unknown> on songtitle, artist and album? It's very annoying...

Oh! Now it's done! It took 2 hours and 46 minutes.
Hey look how smart, I can choose another result instead of the one that Auto Tag Cleaner found. Cool...sometimes I get amazed over how COOL this internet thing is...

[ZenChick]

Ewww! I've been there myself, hon. I can definitely feel your pain. But it will be sooo worth it once it's all done!

[LadyAngel]

Yeah...I feel your symapthy...now when it's done I'm still not happy with it. Many of the songs goet marked as "general rock" or "general pop"...I want it more categorized than that. I prefer it to be "80's rock" and "90's rock" and so on...I guess I should've fixed it myself by typing all the tags in...but who have's the energy?
Is someone here good with the sync thing between ZVM and Windows Media Player version 11? I don't really get how I'm suppose to to it.
Example:
If I wanna change the tags on songs in my ZVM, do I do that the easiest and most convinent way, via the WMP? And how do I do that?
I don't really get it...so please explain the process step by step.

[azngq]

Can you add album art when your music is already in your player? I dont have any album art on my player at all

[Almoxil]

No, you should add album art to your music on the PC and then sync it to the player using WMP or MediaMonkey (or other MTP-capable music management software). Formatting the player before resyncing tracks with album art is advisable.

[sailor_LI]

I've gotten album art to work by using WMP to sync (prior to this I had been sync'ing with CM) and it works fine. But I would rather use tags than files and I know I can update the tags for each file, np.....but it seems like a waste of time when WMP has done the heavy lifting already.

So here's the question: in my folder where I keep my mp3s are all the jpg files for all my albums. But I see no way to access the key that matches the jpg with the album (I assume it's encoded in the file name which matches with something in WMP's DB). Does anyone know how to access this?

I'm a dotnet developer and I have an app that uses the ultraID3 framework to do tagging and also uses the wmp framework to manage playlists....I've searched thru the SDK but found nothing that accesses this info....it would be great to just access the key for each track that leads to the jpg and then use this to tag the mp3, but I can't find anything.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[ZenChick]

Originally Posted by sailor_LI

So here's the question: in my folder where I keep my mp3s are all the jpg files for all my albums. But I see no way to access the key that matches the jpg with the album (I assume it's encoded in the file name which matches with something in WMP's DB). Does anyone know how to access this?

I assume you keep all your MP3's all in the same folder? If that's the case, then - best of luck, hon. I think the only way you'd be able to decipher all the weird filenames is to crack into WMP's database. Unless you've got a particularly large library, it might be easier just to copy all of those .jpg's to another folder, un-hide the copies, then go through them all one-by-one, identify which album each belongs to, and rename accordingly.

[sailor_LI]

Yes, all in one folder, I have good reason to do that. I have about 250 albums or so, I'm getting ready to do the 'one-by-one' approach, but I'm holding off to see if I can do this in a batch with my app. I'd rather avoid the time the manual approach would take, of course.

Yes, the 'cracking the database' part is what I'm asking about

Is there a better place to ask this question on ABI?

Thanks again!

BTW, I've pretty much read all the posts in this thread, very helpful.

[ZenChick]

Originally Posted by sailor_LI

Yes, the 'cracking the database' part is what I'm asking about

Is there a better place to ask this question on ABI?

You might wish to re-pose your question in the Software forum. Someone who knows about hacking WMP's database might see it there.

[Gein]

This is the format used to store the album are in the WMP ID3 tags.

Large
AlbumArt_{FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF}_Large.jpg

AlbumArt__Large.jpg
Folder.jpg
Small
AlbumArt_{FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF}_Small.jpg
AlbumArt__Small.jpg AlbumArtSmall.jpg

Here is the link to the actual site. It's all close to what you want even though the article is about linking it to a web site.

Link: http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/arc...31/913360.aspx

[Waverley73]

I am currently working through my approx 440 albums (around 5,200 songs) re-editing the album and song titles to have the year at the front of the album and track number at the front of each song.

My next project after that is to have the album art embedded into the tags. I don't have the space on my pc to store nearly 30gig worth of songs so is there any way at all to update my tags to include the album art without synching with my pc?

Surely not everyone who owns one of these has their entire collection of 30gig + songs on their pc as well? I have mine backed up on DVD's but that isn't going to help me get the album art on the player.

Why is it that Media Monkey will allow you to edit all information on your songs on the player except for album art (while the songs are on your player, not on the pc)?

[XJ3F3Y]

Originally Posted by Waverley73

Surely not everyone who owns one of these has their entire collection of 30gig + songs on their pc as well? I have mine backed up on DVD's but that isn't going to help me get the album art on the player.

Buy an external hard drive, that's what i did, they're not expensive, my Freecom 400GB was £120. It's way less now, AND will be even cheper in America.

[Waverley73]

Originally Posted by XJ3F3Y

Buy an external hard drive, that's what i did, they're not expensive, my Freecom 400GB was £120. It's way less now, AND will be even cheper in America.

Thanks for your reply mate. Yeah, but that doesn't answer the question of whether it's possible to add album art without having your entire collection on a pc (whether thats an external hard drive or not). I will probably end up getting an external HD anyway but wasn't really planning on taking up 30gig of it with my songs (maybe I should reconsider this?). BTW, I'm in Australia - not America.

[XJ3F3Y]

Originally Posted by Waverley73

Thanks for your reply mate. Yeah, but that doesn't answer the question of whether it's possible to add album art without having your entire collection on a pc (whether thats an external hard drive or not). I will probably end up getting an external HD anyway but wasn't really planning on taking up 30gig of it with my songs (maybe I should reconsider this?). BTW, I'm in Australia - not America.

Yeh, sorry, i can't answer your question. But even outside America, it will still be cheap.

[drewby]

hi
what is the easiest way to get album art on to your player when ripping from an audio cd? is there a step by step guide anywhere

[OldZVMDude]

Originally Posted by drewby

hi
what is the easiest way to get album art on to your player when ripping from an audio cd? is there a step by step guide anywhere

You can't get it form the CD, you have to get it from an external source. I use Amazon to either manually copy image files or use auto-tag within Media Monkey.

[OldZVMDude]

I'm still having a problem that I can't whip. It's frustrating as hell on top of another issue I discovered in Media Monkey when using Volume Leveling. But on to my continued art problem.

I sometimes blow out the ZVM and resync everything just to get all the clean changes I've made.

When I do, random albums drop the art. This time it seems about 10% dropped art. I can delete the album off the ZVM then resync, again, and most of the time it's fine after that; not always.

I have a few tonight that have worked as usual, but a few are stubborn. And yes, the art is still embedded in the file on the PC.

There are a few alums that do it each time, but there are many others that are random.

Any new ideas????

[ZenChick]

When you "blow out the ZVM", do you do a full Disk Format followed by a Disk Cleanup - both from Recovery Mode?