Album Art via MSC (not MPT) - research, questions

[Phlotsam]

Okay, since my discovery that SOME podcasts are able to display album art, while others are not, I've been doing some research.

Note that these are MP3 format files, copied over via MSC/Windows Explorer, using the "USB Removable Storage" driver, not Media Player Tools mode.

The common element for the files which display album art seems to be that they all have an ID3V1 (and usually only) an ID3V1 tag.

Most of the time, MP3Tag won't even show the album art, however MediaMonkey does.

Curiously, (according to Wikipedia) ID3V1 doesn't even officially support album art, so I'm not sure how they're being added.

Anyone with more information, please share!

[CrowdAds]

[Phlotsam]

A bit more information:

First, I've realized that there are two different ways "not" to display album art. One way is to display the "note" graphic, which indicates no album art found. The other way is to display a black box. This appears to happen when the format of the art is not supported.

I've determined through trial and error that the pilot will not support/display JPEG images saved as "progressive" images. If your embedded art is a progressive jpg file, you're going to get a black box.

This can be fixed by exporting the image (if necessary) and opening it and re-saving it. IrFanView is one of many programs which can do this.

I've also verified that MP3Tag can add art to any MP3 file that will show up when files are copied vis MSC, under the Tools-Options dialog in the Tags->Mpeg section, make sure both ID3v1 and ID3v2 are checked, and check either of the ID3v2.3 options (either UTF-16 or ISO-8859-1) and it will work, ID3v2.4 will not work.

Hopefully, this will end a lot of head-scratching about mysteriously missing artwork.

[LT72884]

Originally Posted by Phlotsam

A bit more information:

First, I've realized that there are two different ways "not" to display album art. One way is to display the "note" graphic, which indicates no album art found. The other way is to display a black box. This appears to happen when the format of the art is not supported.

I've determined through trial and error that the pilot will not support/display JPEG images saved as "progressive" images. If your embedded art is a progressive jpg file, you're going to get a black box.

This can be fixed by exporting the image (if necessary) and opening it and re-saving it. IrFanView is one of many programs which can do this.

I've also verified that MP3Tag can add art to any MP3 file that will show up when files are copied vis MSC, under the Tools-Options dialog in the Tags->Mpeg section, make sure both ID3v1 and ID3v2 are checked, and check either of the ID3v2.3 options (either UTF-16 or ISO-8859-1) and it will work, ID3v2.4 will not work.

Hopefully, this will end a lot of head-scratching about mysteriously missing artwork.

hey i just tried it out and it worx, but then again it was only for one song. im trying it out on a m3u playlist. i hope the art shows up that way to. Is it possible to add a directory off of the player and then have it resave the tag data to the player? that would be awesome. im gonna try that. looks like this new years im gonna be working hard..