Solutions for Album Art Problems

[LewdLesion]

As a player Music Match wasn't that great, but their Supper Tagging saved me a lot of time in renaming my collection. Most of my stuff has been renamed this way and album art attached with Supper Tagging.

Do any of you know if MM uses embedded art when you Supper Tag? I myself don't like the idea of cluttering up my system loose jpgs.

Thanks
The Newbie

[CrowdAds]

[ZenChick]

I believe MMJB embeds the album art into the ID3v2 tag.

[aguptaweb]

Originally Posted by LewdLesion

As a player Music Match wasn't that great, but their Supper Tagging saved me a lot of time in renaming my collection. Most of my stuff has been renamed this way and album art attached with Supper Tagging.

Do any of you know if MM uses embedded art when you Supper Tag? I myself don't like the idea of cluttering up my system loose jpgs.

Thanks
The Newbie

So is this pretty easy (i.e. point it to your collection, set it and forget it?) I need to get album art onto my songs (pref. embedded) and Album Cover Art Downloader keeps crashing on me.

[HRS]

I posted this in the firmware revision thread, but has anyone been able to have the correct album art for two albums with exactly the same name?

It seems that the ZVM matches an album art jpeg file with the album itself simply by comparing the names. Therefore, a "greatest hits.jpg" will be the album art file for every album with the name "greatest hits." The work-around (change to unique album names with their own album art files) is a pain and a kluge.

BTW, in Media Monkey there is the option to embed album art in the ID tag but the ZVM seems to ignore it (if it's actually there, which I haven't checked).

[devstorm]

If I may chime in on this subject. I've noticed when dragging folders containing both mp3 & jpg's into the ZVM via the Creative Media Explorer, or using the Wizard, I will get loads of album art errors. Mainly what happens is the same image appears for numerous different albums.

It seems to me the ZVM doesn't handle album art very well on it's own. I seem to remember fixing this temporarily by going into the photo's section on the ZVM & deleting the folder of the jpg that got associated with the mp3's.

Pretty much the only way to insure correct album art is to embed the art into the mp3's directly.

HRS, I believe this (Embedding the art via IDE tags) will also solve the ZVM confusing two albums with the same name & displaying the wrong art. However that in & of itself will cause problems if you're searching for a song only by album. I'd say, best thing to do in that case is edit the tags on Best Of's, Greatest Hits etc. albums to include the artists name as well in the album title.

Media Monkey is really good with embedding art and is the quickest I've found yet. Music Match is pretty slow even on a cable modem. Although Music match is good at finding more then one graphic per artist & giving you a few options for embedding.

I don't neccesarily go out of my way to Tag my stuff with Art. I think if the Art were able to be displayed larger, perhaps like having it as a "screensaver" and switching CD covers as the songs switch, album art would be more of a fun element to the ZVM experience. But in it's current state I think it's more clutter overall but thats just my opinion.

[ZenChick]

Originally Posted by HRS

I posted this in the firmware revision thread, but has anyone been able to have the correct album art for two albums with exactly the same name?

It seems that the ZVM matches an album art jpeg file with the album itself simply by comparing the names. Therefore, a "greatest hits.jpg" will be the album art file for every album with the name "greatest hits." The work-around (change to unique album names with their own album art files) is a pain and a kluge.

BTW, in Media Monkey there is the option to embed album art in the ID tag but the ZVM seems to ignore it (if it's actually there, which I haven't checked).

Yes, it's a little quirk with the ZVM. It caches the album art so that it loads up a bit faster the next time you play that album - unfortunately, it only looks at the album name!

The easiest way to work around this issue is to give all your "Greatest Hits" albums unique names. I use the "artist name's Greatest Hits" format myself. It's not that hard if you use a mass-tagger.

[HRS]

Originally Posted by ZenChick

Yes, it's a little quirk with the ZVM. It caches the album art so that it loads up a bit faster the next time you play that album - unfortunately, it only looks at the album name!.

I find the album art build process (as you move from one album to another in album art view mode) rather slow, taking maybe five seconds to build each new page of thumbnails. It's too bad the entire set of album art files can't be cached.

Originally Posted by ZenChick

The easiest way to work around this issue is to give all your "Greatest Hits" albums unique names. I use the "artist name's Greatest Hits" format myself. It's not that hard if you use a mass-tagger.

Okay, so at least I'm not the only one with this problem; thanks for the confirmation. I did exactly what you suggested--rename the album (and the album art jpeg) to be unique by including the artist's name along with the album title.

This could be solved if the ZVM would recognize album art embedded in track tags but, as far as I can tell, this doesn't work.

[aguptaweb]

There's another little quirk that I've noticed...
When I'm using WMP11, I will connect the player and sync (mostly to fix album art, because I have 100% of my albums tagged with art in WMP). Some will just plain not sync, and some will be lost during the sync. Anyone experienced this and know a workaround?

[ZenChick]

Originally Posted by HRS

This could be solved if the ZVM would recognize album art embedded in track tags but, as far as I can tell, this doesn't work.

It does work, and works quite well - Assuming we're talking about MP3 files, right? The trick is to use an MP3 tagging utility that is ID3v2-compliant (specifically, one that writes tags in the ID3v2.3 or higher format). I don't have any album art whatsoever floating around in my photo album, but yet nearly all of my songs display the album art that I embedded into them. It does work, it's just not something that is well documented.

[HRS]

Originally Posted by ZenChick

It does work, and works quite well - Assuming we're talking about MP3 files, right? The trick is to use an MP3 tagging utility that is ID3v2-compliant (specifically, one that writes tags in the ID3v2.3 or higher format). I don't have any album art whatsoever floating around in my photo album, but yet nearly all of my songs display the album art that I embedded into them. It does work, it's just not something that is well documented.

Well, I did try saving album art obtained from Amazon via Media Monkey into the ID tags for an album or two, but nothing carried over to my ZVM. I will try again just to be sure I didn't goof up. To be honest, this is only an issue with duplicate album titles.

Update--I ripped a new CD with Media Money and chose to save the Amazon-supplied album art to the track ID tags and...it worked! I have no idea what I did wrong before, but this is the easiest way to get around the problem of multiple identically named album names.

[ZenChick]

Originally Posted by HRS

To be honest, this is only an issue with duplicate album titles.

Apparently, this is your problem. It is a known (at least to us) issue with the ZVM and the way it caches album art. When it encounters a song from a given album, it will cache the album art it retrieves from the tag. The next time it encounters a song from that particular album, it simply uses the cached image. Unfortunately, as you've found, this doesn't work well when you have multiple albums with the same name. Albums titled simply "Greatest Hits" is the most common example.

The way I've worked around this issue was to just simply edit the "Album" tag to include the artist's name; so songs off an album from ABBA simply called "Greatest Hits" will get retagged so that their ID3 tags' album field reads "ABBA's Greatest Hits". It's simple, effective, and doesn't really alter the true name of the album.

[HRS]

Ms. Zenchick:
Yes, I know the ZVM cannot correctly distinguish standalone album art among albums with exactly the same name. At first, I went through and changed the duplicate albums names and art to be unique. Now, I just have Media Monkey save the art directly into the ID tags.

[ZenChick]

Even with the fully-embedded solution (which I also use), the ZVM is still going to have problems distinguishing album art among non-unique albums unless you employ the workaround to make all the album names unique.

[HRS]

Originally Posted by ZenChick

Even with the fully-embedded solution (which I also use), the ZVM is still going to have problems distinguishing album art among non-unique albums unless you employ the workaround to make all the album names unique.

You are correct! I did an experiment using Media Monkey to tag three albums having the same name. MM put (and displayed) the correct art in each album's tags (and not as a separate jpeg file).

But, once the albums were sent to the ZVM, it showed only one album, not three, with one of the albums' art displayed. And, all three albums' tracks were combined into the one album on the ZVM!

This is one major screw-up in the ZVM. Maybe it's firmware-fixable?? So, it's back to making unique album names

[ZenChick]

It's not a fault with the ZVM. It's just a limitation of the ID3 tagging system. Your ZVM is correctly cataloging all your music by album name, but has no way of determining which song came from which album titled "Greatest Hits".

You will also encounter this problem with any media library manager you come across, ie. MusicMatch, Music Monkey, Winamp, Windows Media Player, etc., when you display songs by album. That's why you have to give each unique album a unique name.

[HRS]

Originally Posted by ZenChick

It's not a fault with the ZVM. It's just a limitation of the ID3 tagging system. Your ZVM is correctly cataloging all your music by album name, but has no way of determining which song came from which album titled "Greatest Hits".

*snip*

I'll defer to your knowledge of ID tags. But the collection of information in a track's tag will include the album name, track name and album art (if it's put there). So, wouldn't this information be sufficient to allow a properly designed MP3 player to have multiple albums with the same name, keeping the tracks and album art in the correct places?

[ZenChick]

Yes, and no. It would be possible to have the player create several "Greatest Hits" album listings based on, say, the artist's name. However, this would break compilation albums (albums with songs by various artists) rather badly -- If you ripped and synced such an album, then the album would not appear under one heading, but under a dozen or so! It would be impossible to keep such an album intact under such a scheme.

[OTACORB]

The way the iPod gets around this is that it doesn't use embedded album art, it actually saves the album art to a data file using the artist name and album title. Apple claims this also means that it takes less resources and space. However, I have found the ZV:M reads the album art much quicker than an iPod with its data file. We all know the battery life on the 30 gig iPod isn't as good as the ZV:M. So, other than the issues of albums having the same name creating an album art issue due to caching, I don't see the avantage of the data file. I found the iPod took up to 2 seconds to even show the album art, whereas my ZV:M is instant.

I personally don't see this issue as a big flaw or deal. Once you learn the method in which to name your albums this issue goes away and never returns. I personally think the ZV:M does great with album art. I am pleased and happy that all 2745 of my music files have album art that displays. I am adding more everyday.

[HRS]

I have collected album art from various sources, and some of it is very large, up to 300x300 pixels. The ZVM does scale the various jpeg sizes down to whatever resolution it displays, but it seems reasonable to assume that resizing takes processing time in the player. Presumably, album art files presized to the ZVM's resolution would load faster.

So...the question-does anyone know the "native" resolution that the ZVM uses to display album art? I'm guessing something like 72x72 to 80x80 pixels, based on the about-25 percent of the 320 pixel width that album art uses on the screen. A related question is bit depth, which I'm guessing is either 16 or 24.

[ZenChick]

If you're worried about optimal loading speed (and reducing the size of your MP3 files), you should go with 75x75px images at 16-bit color depth. But, honestly? I haven't noticed any kind of slowdown whatsoever with some of the large 300x300px images at 24-bit that I've used. The amount of time you'd save by using small, 16-bit images would only be a few milliseconds -- far offset by the amount of time it would take to manually resize all your images and resample them to 16-bit!

I get most of my album art from Google's music search engine. They're all smallish 90x90 images, and the image quality is generally good.