MediaMonkey: Hopefully the Last Word on Album Art

[cpurick]

I just transferred 800 songs to my new J3 -- about twenty times. I was trying to economize and simplify the process, while preserving all my hard-earned album art. I learned a lot, and since album art is one of the biggest complaints about the J3, I thought I'd share it here. I know if I for one had seen this post before I started working with my own J3 I'd have saved a lot of time.

One thing that surprised me was that it made no difference whether I used MTP or MSC. Based on what I'd read around here, I expected that to make all the difference. In fact, it turned out to be a red herring: When it comes to album art, anyway, what works on MSC works on MTP (and vice versa), and what doesn't work under one protocol won't work on the other either.

The bottom line is this: The J3 is terribly inconsistent at extracting and organizing embedded art. It may be related to certain tag types, certain graphic dimensions or jpg compression schemes, or even duplicate album names. In fact, the J3 has so many problems with embedded art that it's hard to identify exactly which combinations make it choke. But in the end, relying on embedded art will get you hopelessly blank tracks, art that flickers, and this is the worst -- mismatched art. You can spend a lot of time organizing your art, and you will never get it recognized correctly in the J3 -- at least not as of firmware Rev 2.2, anyway.

I use MediaMonkey. Your mileage may vary, but MM is free. So there's really no reason you can't use MM, if nothing else works.

Anyway -- here are the best tips I can offer for organizing your album art:

First and foremost, if you haven't already done so, go to the privacy tab in Windows Media Player and turn off all the internet stuff. That thing is a virus, and it will totally wreck your album art by resizing your art, downloading images you don't want, and inserting them into your tracks. Seriously: There ought to be a law...

Then, using the album art property tab in MediaMonkey, page through all your tracks looking for blank and duplicate images. If there's a blank image embedded in your track you should never be surprised to see blank artwork on your PMP. Blanks have to go.

And since the J3 will cycle through available images, you need to eliminate dupes. Even if you have perfect duplicates the J3 will "flicker" as it switches from one copy of the image to the other, not to mention the space you're wasting in your device with a couple hundred extra copies of your art. Even worse, if you have both hi- and low-res versions of images in your track, the image will appear to blur and resharpen as the J3 cycles between them.

Next, use the description label on your images. I had much better results with my embedded art attempts by simply identifying some images as "Cover (front)" rather than "unspecified". This likely affects the cycle order, as well, though I haven't experimented with multiple images (as I just want cover art). For what it's worth, I also tried to make sure that the "Cover (front)" image was at the top of the list, and that it referred to the embedded image rather than the folder.jpg (or as I refer to it, cover.jpg) file.

Finally, there's a checkbox on the MM Album Art properties tab: "Apply to all tracks on the Album." You'll want that on. Things go a lot faster when you only have to edit one track per album, and you'll want MM associating a single cover art image with all the tracks in the album folder.

Now, that's not all just for good organization. Remember, the J3's pretty bad with embedded art. But you do still want a link between all the tracks on an album and MM's notion of what image is the cover art for that allbum, and this will give you that.

If you've done all this correctly, here's how to sync. Again, I went through many iterations to work this out. Sometimes half my art would be blank. Sometimes only ten percent would be blank, and in the course of trying to fix that I'd end up blanking another ten percent (or more) of my images. But this -- what follows -- is the combination that got me every picture, from the first time I tried it.

Appropriately enough, these settings go on the "Device Configuration" tab of the "Configure Device" properties found by right-clicking on the J3 node of the main navigation tree in MM.

1. "Sync all Album Art to Track folders" Checked, with filename "cover.jpg". This is the scheme that works reliably on the J3. Note that it doesn't seem to matter whether there's an actual "cover.jpg" in your album folder -- apparently the MM sync process will create a "cover.jpg" by extracting the art from a track in the album. Note that if any of the tracks don't have album art, that "blank" could become "the" cover art for the entire album -- an easy enough fix if it happens.

2. "Copy Album Art to Track tags" OFF. Unchecked. NO!!! If your track has art in it, this is going to install an extra copy of cover.jpg or folder.jpg inside your track. This creates duplicate images in the track, and will give you either a flicker or a blur-unblur-blur animation as the J3 cycles between the multiple images it finds in the track. And again, if one of these image pointers is a blank, that blank could become the image assocated with your track, or even the whole album.

3. "Remove images from tags if larger than:" Checked on, image size 0KB. Basically, we've resolved to use cover.jpg for our art -- so why waste space with embedded tags? If you leave this on, you'll want to manage your embedded art separately from your album art. That's the way to get the neat multi-image art without a whole bunch of duplicates.

4. Finally, a word on protocols. This procedure works the same, between MediaMonkey and the J3, whether you use MTP or MSC. But MTP is required to set up playlists on the J3, and any subsequent MSC connection will apparently delete your playlists. That said, I'm going to try sticking with MTP. If I can do it for a while without switching to MSC, I might invest some time in setting up some decent playlists. But that's a big if, because I haven't yet figured out how to move videos to the J3 with MTP, and because (prior to sorting out the album art settings) it's been so helpful to be able to delete the artwork database in the MusicDB folder through MSC. We'll see.
But playlists are so important that it may be worth working out all the other issues so I can stay in MTP.

[g.711]

I went through the same process, my art was so jacked up I decided to delete ALL my art and then let WM Player redownload the art. Then I used MM to customize selected artist and then sync'd all work great.

[lestatar]

Hmmm, dfkt was recently having issues with J3 and album art under MTP - wonder if he saw this/tried this?

[The DarkSide]

I embedded all my album art in the tags via Media Monkey, and I removed all the .jpg's from the folders - works 100% for me now.
Maury Povich would be proud ("You ARE the person w/the answer!!!").

[lestatar]

TDS: lol...where's Connie Chung?

[cpurick]

Originally Posted by The DarkSide

I embedded all my album art in the tags via Media Monkey, and I removed all the .jpg's from the folders - works 100% for me now.
Maury Povich would be proud ("You ARE the person w/the answer!!!").

That would probably work, TDS. I think the real key is in the device configuration settings. What values do you have for "Sync art to Folders", "Copy art to tags", and "Remove images from tags"?

[The DarkSide]

I think I have it as "copy album art to tags", and I've made sure nothing else is used - seems to confuse the heck out of the J3's database. I'll give a 100% answer later, as I'm a bit busy ATM.

[RoloJam]

I personally turn off MM feature to update album art tags. It has a tendency to add all jpegs in the folder as multiple artwork files into the tags. This has 2 effects that I don't like. 1. Artwork, I don't want as an album cover. 2. Increased files sizes with multiple embedded artwork. I just use mp3tag for tagging the artwork. Much simpler in a lot of cases than the large dialogs in MM.

I do use MM to clean up the mismatched tags. Stupid stuff like not having a "The" as a bands name which results in duplicates in the artist sorts. This is nice since MM with the right settings ignores the "The" in the bands name.

[The DarkSide]

I added all the album art and tags myself,....I don't let ANY program do an auto-update.

[lestatar]

Originally Posted by The DarkSide

I added all the album art and tags myself,....I don't let ANY program do an auto-update.

+1...I am a control freak with tags and art...