SD Card and Album Art

[RumRunner]

I have what I think is strange issue. I am using an SD card to play music and having problems displaying the album art. But it's not just what others seem to have issues with (the art just not showing up for some files), I also have some files that have the image, but when the song plays, it shows the image from another song on the SD card.

I also have some songs in multiple folders, and the same file copied from one folder to another, in one folder the art shows, and in another folder it does not.

Anyone else have these issues, and idea how to solve them?

Audio wise, all the files work fine. And it's not a big deal to not have art display, but its' really odd to have the album of another artist showing during a song.

Thanks...

 

[Broyd]

Are each of your albums stored in a separate folder? I think they should be ...

When you add album art to an album, do you add the art to BOTH the album AND each individual song within that album? These are two separate places where album art can be stored.

I am suspecting that some of your songs do not have album art stored within them so the truck is using art that was previously found and decoded from some other album.

Does this fit?

 

[RumRunner]

Well, I am slowly learning more about the album art. I didn't know that the art files were separate and hidden system files.

But to answer your question, I just took the mp3's and wma's that I had on my PC (which have the art already when you click on them) and copied them to the SD card. The art came along with them.

As far as folders, I have about 5 folders separated by music type to use as playlists. So there are multiple songs per folder.

 

[Broyd]

Well, in addition to the .mp3 or .aac encoded music data contained in each track, you can have song title, parent album name, track number, artist, composer, cd maker, production year, album art, album booklet, and more ... all called METADATA. That info is not hidden really, it is just how that data in each file is interpreted. Each piece of this metadata is called a TAG.

This stuff is visible when you use the right program to look it.. I prefer Tag&Rename. This program allows you to view and change the info contained in the tags.

There are restrictions on the number of pixels album art can have in this Uconnect system. I think it is about 500X500 (height x width) (maybe 900x900) pixels per cover image. That might also be a source of your problem.

 

[RumRunner]

Great info thanks. I think I need to educate myself more on this stuff. My last vehicle was a Jeep GC and it had an internal HDD that I just loaded everything on and it didn't have album art to deal with so I didn't have any of these issues.

I will have to get a software app to work on this, so far I've just been copying the files through windows without any editing.

I appreciate all the info.

 

[Broyd]

As I mentioned, I like Tag&Rename but it's not free.

Here is a good free one that will get you started: mp3tag

It will also allow you to create playlists compatible with Uconnect.

Have fun - enjoy the learning experience!

Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...)

 

[RumRunner]

Thanks, I will give that a try.

Do you think it's worthwhile to convert all the wma's to mp3? I have a mixture of both right now. Thinking if I should do that, that will be my first step.

 

[Broyd]

No, the effort to convert is not worth it AND it will not gain you anything in terms of audio quality.

However, if you want consistency, then you can do it. But that software will handle tags in both of those formats.

Also, every time you convert one lossy format to another, there will always be some further loss in audio quality.

Because you downloaded pre ripped tracks, you are stuck with whatever quality the original uploader put there.

I don't know how important super audio quality is. With all the road, engine and AC noise you most likely could not hear differences anyway.

 

[RumRunner]

Yeah I didn't end up converting. But did try the mp3tag program and so far it seems to be fixing my problem. Although I had to learn that when you pull down the art it also changes the song title tag, which I didn't realize was happening until I tried it again and found the same song title on multiple songs LOL.

But now they seem to be working on. I did one folder to test, now have to go through and do the others.

Odd that the art shows on the files on the computer on all of them, but then open in mp3tag and some do not have the art showing there.

Anyway, thanks for the info, I am on the right track now.

 

[Broyd]

Remember what I first said. The album, which is contained in a folder so that all of the songs are files in that folder. A folder is just another type of file! You can add album art to the folder BUT it should also be added to each song in the album. Ya duplication I know but that ensures that as each song is played, it's appropriate album art is right there in the metadata for that track.

I think the fact that you don't see the album art in some tracks means that it isn't there within that track. The purpose of mp3tag is to tell you exactly what's in your tags, not to pull something out of thin air. Some of these programs are smart, they will pull album art from the album metadata if it isn't in the track - which can result in the wrong album art for a particular track.

It would be instructive to see what the Uconnect system does with those files you found using mp3tag that do not contain album art. If you do this test, let me know what you find .

 

[RumRunner]

Yeah I have been going back and forth from computer to Uconnect while testing. So any of the tracks that didn't contain art were not showing anything in Uconnect. Some of the tracks contained the wrong art, even though the right art was in the folder. So I was seeing the right art on the computer, but then Uconnect would display something different.

The unexplainable part is that some of the tracks in Uconnect displayed art that was not in the folder or in the track. But using the mp3tag program seems to have fixed all that. I just completed going through all the folders I had on the SD Card, so tomorrow I will find out if all is good now. It's been some trial and error, and now that I know how to change all the different tags, I may do some adjusting to display exactly what I want. But I think I should be good after this last round of changes.

 

[Broyd]

Sounds like you are nearly there...
One last question: when you used mp3tag, WHAT was in the album art for those tracks that Uconnect showed incorrect art? Specifically, was there no art in that track or was it incorrect art or was the pixel size too big? Thanks

 

[RumRunner]

that is the odd thing, some had not art and some seemed to have the correct art. But it wasn't consistent with what Uconnect showed. I have some of the art at 600x600 that still shows up.

But after going out to find the art and setting it with mp3tag it all worked. I even filled in some blanks of other tags that were missing data in a few tracks. Also was able to change the art if it happened to be an image I didn't like.

 

[Broyd]

Yup, strange. Maybe the art wasn't an allowed filetype and Uconnect didn't like it?? A complete guess. Anyway it's all good your are getting the results you want.

 

[John94z]

I'm too lazy to read this whole thread so it may have been already said but you should embed the album art directly to the files. There is freeware that will do this. You wont have these issues if you do this.