Gwynmawr
03-03-2014, 08:49 PM
Hi,
For all you new car owners thought I’d share what took me a while to learn - how to get the artwork on the SD card based system showing every time.
I found iTunes (both purchased and imported CDs) didn’t always show the artwork, and even if it did, the artwork was sometimes low quality, which looked terrible in the car.
To ensure each album has decent art that showed up in the car, I did the following:
1. Artwork must be a maximum of 800x800 pixels and no bigger than 200K – I use .jpg format which works just fine.
2. Use a freeware program (hope is ok to mention this here) like mp3tag and use it to browse to the folder that iTunes stores your music. If you don’t know where iTunes puts your music, from within iTunes, right click on a song and select ‘Get Info’ from the resulting shortcut menu - the location is shown.
3. When you browse to your song listings in mp3tag, the left hand window pane will show you a preview of the album art including the resolution and physical size. Many of mine weren’t showing in the car because the 800x800 pixel size had been exceeded (especially for Podcasts) or were bigger than the allowed 200K. The alternative, which was even worse, was in the car they looked awful as were very low resolution – some as low as 175x175 pixels ! mp3tag allows you to see exactly what you are dealing with.
4. If you have no artwork, or poor quality artwork, use this trick to get decent quality artwork embedded into the songs….
i. In your web browser Google the name of the song + itunes (e.g. Google ‘in between dreams jack Johnson itunes’) to get the album listing that matches your album. Note this is in your web browser, not iTunes itself.
ii. Right Click the album thumbnail picture on the web page and select ‘Copy image location’ (FIREFOX) or ‘copy image address' on a Mac which copies the url of the image into clipboard. Not sure what equivalent is on IE as I don't use it.
iii. paste this url into the address bar of the browser but DO NOT press return just yet. Instead manually edit the end of the url (that will have ….170x170-75.jpg) and replace it with 600x600-75.jpg and then hit enter. This will take you to a page with top quality 600x600 pixel artwork ideal for the car.
iv. Right click on the artwork and save the pic to your hard disk
5. Return to mp3tag. Select either the single or multiple songs (if an album) and then press alt+t to call up the tag label box.
6. If necessary, hit the ‘X’ button to delete any poor quality artwork, then click the ‘add cover button’ and browse to the high quality pic you just downloaded.
7. Click OK and mp3tag will embed that high quality pic into all the selected songs.
8. Finally, when you’ve done your whole music collection, drag and drop all the music folders from your hard disk onto your SD card.
Now, with the correct sized, high quality album art embedded in each song, artwork will appear correctly (and look good) when played in the car.
addition to my original post following replies from others....If you're doing albums rather than individual tracks you don't need to use mp3tag to embed the pic in every track, instead just rename the pic folder.jpg and save it in the same folder as your album, works a treat.
One final point - If you are doing this on a Mac, you’ll find the Mac creates ‘._’ files for each song. This file format is used on a Mac to store extra info along with the file. This is a pain as they don’t show up on a Mac (even when showing hidden files), but do show up in the car, don’t play, so you have to manually delete them on a Windows box else you’ll spend all day scrolling past them in the car. In the end I got so frustrated I just did the whole thing on a Windows box rather than a Mac, even though I’m a die hard Mac user.
Hope this helps some of you shinny new ’14 plate owners and hopefully save you the time and frustration I felt researching and google’ing to find solution.
Best wishes.
For all you new car owners thought I’d share what took me a while to learn - how to get the artwork on the SD card based system showing every time.
I found iTunes (both purchased and imported CDs) didn’t always show the artwork, and even if it did, the artwork was sometimes low quality, which looked terrible in the car.
To ensure each album has decent art that showed up in the car, I did the following:
1. Artwork must be a maximum of 800x800 pixels and no bigger than 200K – I use .jpg format which works just fine.
2. Use a freeware program (hope is ok to mention this here) like mp3tag and use it to browse to the folder that iTunes stores your music. If you don’t know where iTunes puts your music, from within iTunes, right click on a song and select ‘Get Info’ from the resulting shortcut menu - the location is shown.
3. When you browse to your song listings in mp3tag, the left hand window pane will show you a preview of the album art including the resolution and physical size. Many of mine weren’t showing in the car because the 800x800 pixel size had been exceeded (especially for Podcasts) or were bigger than the allowed 200K. The alternative, which was even worse, was in the car they looked awful as were very low resolution – some as low as 175x175 pixels ! mp3tag allows you to see exactly what you are dealing with.
4. If you have no artwork, or poor quality artwork, use this trick to get decent quality artwork embedded into the songs….
i. In your web browser Google the name of the song + itunes (e.g. Google ‘in between dreams jack Johnson itunes’) to get the album listing that matches your album. Note this is in your web browser, not iTunes itself.
ii. Right Click the album thumbnail picture on the web page and select ‘Copy image location’ (FIREFOX) or ‘copy image address' on a Mac which copies the url of the image into clipboard. Not sure what equivalent is on IE as I don't use it.
iii. paste this url into the address bar of the browser but DO NOT press return just yet. Instead manually edit the end of the url (that will have ….170x170-75.jpg) and replace it with 600x600-75.jpg and then hit enter. This will take you to a page with top quality 600x600 pixel artwork ideal for the car.
iv. Right click on the artwork and save the pic to your hard disk
5. Return to mp3tag. Select either the single or multiple songs (if an album) and then press alt+t to call up the tag label box.
6. If necessary, hit the ‘X’ button to delete any poor quality artwork, then click the ‘add cover button’ and browse to the high quality pic you just downloaded.
7. Click OK and mp3tag will embed that high quality pic into all the selected songs.
8. Finally, when you’ve done your whole music collection, drag and drop all the music folders from your hard disk onto your SD card.
Now, with the correct sized, high quality album art embedded in each song, artwork will appear correctly (and look good) when played in the car.
addition to my original post following replies from others....If you're doing albums rather than individual tracks you don't need to use mp3tag to embed the pic in every track, instead just rename the pic folder.jpg and save it in the same folder as your album, works a treat.
One final point - If you are doing this on a Mac, you’ll find the Mac creates ‘._’ files for each song. This file format is used on a Mac to store extra info along with the file. This is a pain as they don’t show up on a Mac (even when showing hidden files), but do show up in the car, don’t play, so you have to manually delete them on a Windows box else you’ll spend all day scrolling past them in the car. In the end I got so frustrated I just did the whole thing on a Windows box rather than a Mac, even though I’m a die hard Mac user.
Hope this helps some of you shinny new ’14 plate owners and hopefully save you the time and frustration I felt researching and google’ing to find solution.
Best wishes.