SD Album art on Amundsen?

[vRSRG]

I'm taking delivery of a new Octy later this week with Amundsen, is there a way of having album art show on the screen? I have copied the audio files from iTunes on a Mac and the album art shows on the files when viewed on the computer but then all I'm left with on the Amundsen is the unsightly image of a SD card. Any help would be gratefully received!

PS - great to be back after a year of weakness with BMW!

[john999boy]

On my BMW the album art shows if the 'art' is embedded into the mp3. If you're viewing on your computer screen then the computer may be streaming the art from the net?

 

I use Tag&Rename to ensure that everything is correct.

[vRSRG]

Thanks.........still don't seem able to get it to work :-(

[Schodoodles]

I use mediamonkey and that works fine as long as I attach the photo to the file; its free and grabs the album artwork from the web. Give that a go.

Believe it has to be of the correct size to be shown on the screen though but it normally sorts that itself.

[vRSRG]

Cheers - I'll give this a try :-)

[kitset]

If I remember correctly iTunes does not embed the album art by default. It puts the art in a folder on your computer and links to it (hence it not showing in the car). You can get iTunes to embed the artwork but it's a bit of a pain en-masse.

 

To embed in iTunes right-click on a song to get to the long list of options (sorry, don't know the right-click equivalent on a mac!) > "get info" > "Artwork" tab > right-click and "copy" the image (if there's no image in there to start with, then do a google search for the album image and copy it from there) > exit back out to iTunes then select the full album > right click > "get info" > "Info" tab > paste the copied art into the "Artwork" box in the bottom right corner > save and exit.

 

Sounds long winded, but it's pretty quick if you're doing just a few albums. It's also possible there's an easier way to do this in iTunes, but this is what I've found works. If you need to do a collection I'd use a specific tagging programme like the one mentioned above.

[Miz]

If you only want the album artwork, then save file called album.jpg with a max size of 225 x 225 in the album folder on the SD card or USB.

 

I have just used Tag&Rename and that is all that it has done to my collection, could not be bothered with tagging each track.

[CainDingle]

Ressurection of an old(ish) thread but seeing as this was here thought there wasn't much point starting a new one. I've gone through all my album art - it took a whole evening - with Mp3Tag, changing the art to fit the requirements of the Amundsen (500x500 and 200kb max, all JPG files). The album covers are embedded into the mp3 files themselves and all come up fine EXCEPT with maybe 8 or 9 random albums (out of, say, 100), where it's not displayed at all on any of the tracks on that album.

 

Clearly in such cases there's some kind of issue with the particular image file I've embedded into the track. However, I don't know what it is. And I can't figure out what it is either. They all seem to fit the criteria, any pre-existing artwork has been stripped out before I started, they're all the right shape (i.e. exactly square - there's no 'long and thin' ones or anything) but still some of them don't work.

 

Anyone able to shed any light on this from trial and error etc? Thanks

[999rigger]

You need to have the albumart jpeg in the same folder as the music for each album. Then it will show on the screen when you play the album.

[CainDingle]

You need to have the albumart jpeg in the same folder as the music for each album. Then it will show on the screen when you play the album.

I've not got any jpeg files in the folders containing the music - the jpegs are themselves embedded in the metadata of the ID3 tag on each mp3 file. This is an acceptable alternative to having the 'folder.jpg' file or similar sitting in the actual folder (both according to the manual and also evidenced by the fact that all of my mp3 files are done like this and most of them show the album art on the Amundsen without issue).

 

I tested this by stripping out the album art from an album's worth of mp3s and instead putting the exact same JPG in the folder as a standalone image file. Still nothing showing. So, I used a different image file (same album cover, different size) and it worked, both with the artwork sat in the folder with the music files and also when it was embedded in the files themselves.

 

The problem is that both image files fit the criteria set down by Skoda (they were both 300x300 and around 50(ish) kb in size. One worked, the other didn't. Which led me to the only possible conclusion: i.e. that there's something else about the image file itself that rendered it incompatible. But what that something IS is the mystery.

 

If I could figure it out then it'd save a lot of time in the future when adding music to the SD card, but also at the moment I've effectively got to sit in the car with a notepad and pen, go through all the albums manually, note down which work and which don't, redo the album art for each, go back to the car, hope they all work, and when X of them don't, go back and try again with a different file for those ones. Bit of a faff in order to just get a picture to display on the screen. As such if anyone's got the 'knack' to selecting ones which are guaranteed to work, it'd be much appreciated!

[Mort]

I'm having the same problem on my Bolero. No real difference between the jpgs. But, that said, sometimes it just decides not to show art for certain tracks that it's shown artwork for before. Skipping forward and back sometimes works to make it re-load the artwork.

 

I think it's just badly coded software, not much you can do, couldn't justify £1300 for proper video and iPhone integration so happy to live with a little image of an SD card now and again. Will try re-embedding the artwork for the albums that consistently don't show, but no idea why they're different?

[CainDingle]

I'm having the same problem on my Bolero. No real difference between the jpgs. But, that said, sometimes it just decides not to show art for certain tracks that it's shown artwork for before. Skipping forward and back sometimes works to make it re-load the artwork.

 

I think it's just badly coded software, not much you can do, couldn't justify £1300 for proper video and iPhone integration so happy to live with a little image of an SD card now and again. Will try re-embedding the artwork for the albums that consistently don't show, but no idea why they're different?

I'd considered that this might be the case. It's a really stupid thing to get irritated over I suppose but it does irritate me! I wasn't actually that bothered about it initially, then I thought 'oh that's nice, it shows your album art' and decided to sort it so everything had art associated with it. More to look flash than anything else. However now I've spent time on it it's become a personal crusade. I think it's the arbitrary nature of what it decides to show and not to show that is the most frustrating thing.

[JPH0091]

You indeed have to embed the image in the mp3. Additionally the user guide provides the following restriction: 500 x 500 pixels (200 kb).

From itunes, I exported in mp3, then embedded the cover art with MediaMonkey. I still have a number of cover art not displayed, as I did not check each image size individually.

Edited 29 October, 2014 by JPH0091

[andyvee]

Try using 'Sanse mp3 Art Sizer' and setting the quality to 80% or 90% and the size to 499x499

[kitset]

Beware, rant below...

 

This is such a classic example of dumb technology. Car stereos (sorry, "infotainment"...) are by far and away the worst pieces of hardware for adapting to actual advances in technology.  Needing to resize all artwork in an MP3 tag is freaking ridiculous! That's the sort of thing that was needed in the 00's for media players. I still remember my old iRiver fondly, where I went through this exact process for album art - but that was 10 years ago! It's just as bad for video files - must be a particular size, frame rate, and audio codec to work.  So the car forces me to recode any video I want to play in the car - that's just not going to happen. As a result, I've converted a single video file, just to see if I could get one to play. I did, and I'm almost positive that's the last time I will ever watch a video on that screen - which is a shame cause I often have down time in the car where watching a movie would be most welcome.  How hard is it to provide the ability to play a broad arrange of file types and sizes? My crappy 3 year old Android tablet can do (virtually) everything better than my brand new Columbus ICE (ok, it can't play FM radio...) - that's just sad. And yet it's full of useless tech like being able to rip a CD?! Is that for the Skoda owner who doesn't have or know how to a computer? Don't even get me stated on how ugly the UI and how poor the UX is. It's like the people that design this shlte are 70 year olds looking at tech magazines from the early 2000's for inspiration! 

 

Apologies, rant over.

[harrysprout]

If you have photoshop or summat similar. Just choose an album art you know displays. Drop the offending file over the top and flatten the file

Re save as a jpg. Re tag with tagger. That works for me.

Edited 29 October, 2014 by harrysprout

[CainDingle]

Cheers lads - will try some of these tips tomorrow and report back!

[CainDingle]

Try using 'Sanse mp3 Art Sizer' and setting the quality to 80% or 90% and the size to 499x499

 

Tried this and it seems to have worked brilliantly, thanks Andy.

 

The latest version of the program (dunno if I'm allowed to post the link but it's quite hard to find - google 'Hot Coffee Software' and you'll get it) only lets you do WxH in increments of 50 (so 250x250, 300x300 etc) and quality settings in increments of 5%. However going on the instructions they give for best compatibility with all devices I went for 250x250 at 85% quality and resized all the mp3 artwork (which was extracted from and then re-saved into the tags rather than separate files) at that setting. Took about 2 hours for 4000 songs on a decent PC writing straight to the SD card. Everything seems to display perfectly on the Amundsen and actually looks much better than when it was at 500x500 or other larger size.

[Yogi-Bear]

'Hot Coffee Software'

 

I can't be the only one now thinking about a certain mod to a certain video game... can I? 

[nickcoll]

For anyone reading this who uses a Mac, there's a great application called Metadatics which is only £6.99 in the Apple Mac App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/metadatics/id554883654?mt=12) to embed artwork or indeed change any other aspect of the tagging of an MP3 (or FLAC, WAVE, AIFF etc, for that matter, not that you can use them in your Skoda head unit).

 

Furthermore there is another (free) application called "Cleanup SMB Mess" which strips out the dot files and then ejects the SD card so that it is ready to put straight into your slot in the car.

 

Having said all that, I am still struggling to get the artwork to display reliably - I am pretty sure it is not the software that's at fault but the ridiculously pedantic requirements of the head unit. I will hopefully sort it out soon, but judging from the above I am not that hopeful. Metadatics gives you excellent control over the album artwork - you can set it to whatever size you want and control the degree of compression (quality) of the JPEG. It also shows you how big the JPEG will be in KB as you adjust its settings. Very well worth its small cost.

[CainDingle]

So. I've managed to come up with a reliable way of getting mp3 files 'laundered' to suit the amundsen head unit (and, in my case, the canton system) with a PC. No warranty given - this is just what I do now whenever I rip a new CD (or more likely, download something from amazon) and it's got album art measuring 735 x 231 and is twenty times louder than all my other files. It seems to make 'em sound ok in the car and all the album art and other info embedded displays fine.

 

NB: This may have the added side effect of making everything sound like Iron Maiden, especially if the original files are at a particularly low decibel level. I don't particularly care about the quality of the audio in the car, as long as I can hear it above the tyre roar, wind noise and sound of BMW drivers honking at me for going too slowly. As such it's probably sensible to keep copies of your original files in case anything goes wrong (or indeed if you find that this process makes them sound awful when listening on a proper stereo, in which case you may wish to just do this bit on the SD card so as to keep your original ones pristine). I don't but then I like to live on the edge. Try with a couple of albums first and experiment to see what sounds best.

 

Here goes. You'll need the following software or suitable alternative:

 

mp3gain

Musicbrainz picard

mp3tag

paintbrush/photoshop/etc

 

1. Run all the tracks on the album through mp3gain to normalize them, so they are played at a consistent decibel level and you don't have to keep turning the volume up and down between tracks (I tend to have all my music on random in the car and the differences in sound level can be really annoying). I go for 100db - which a lot of people would say is too much but it doesn't seem to cause any audible clipping or buzzing with my files - the original db for 75% of 'em was around 97 so it's not normally too much of a jump). Moreover the 'recommended setting' of 89db I find far too quiet and on the same volume setting it's MUCH quieter than, say, the line output of the radio in the car. 100db seems to me to be a decent match for the other sound sources. The program can either normalize on a track-by-track basis or album-by-album; the latter is the one I go for as it brings everything up to a standard decibel level BUT maintains the volume differences between individual tracks on the same album. Some songs on an album are meant to be quieter than others, essentially.

 

2. Once that's done, run 'em through a really great program called MusicBrainz Picard. This basically looks at all the id3 tags on your files and sorts them out. It takes a bit of getting your head round in terms of the way it works, but once you get the knack it's invaluable. One excellent feature, which works surprisingly well, is that it can scan a file even if it has no filename or id3 tag, and work out what it is by matching the waveform of the sound against the Musicbrainz database. Essentially it listens to a file and tells you what it is - you can use it to edit/standardise the filenames themselves as well as the tags if you wish. I set the thing to clear the tags completely and then rewrite them (provided in each case that it's proposing to overwrite them with the correct data). Be careful of getting it to replace the album art, as the stuff it chooses isn't always uniform in size and sometimes it can't find anything even for really popular albums. I learned this through bitter experience when it replaced all of the art I had previously managed down to 300x300 (see points 3 and 4) with a load of tosh. Could've cried.

 

3. This is the bit that takes the time but as a right sad person I think it's worth it. Use mp3tag to batch-update your songs with the correct album art. To do this you select a jpeg file and tell it to embed it in the tag - but the thing that takes the time is actually getting the jpeg file in the first place. To do this I manually download album covers from an advanced google image search (where you can set the parameters so that it only finds jpegs that are square (e.g. 250x250, 725x725 or whatever - doesn't matter, as long as it's square). Save the jpg to a temporary folder, select the songs in mp3tag you want to tag with it (usually an album's worth), set the option to remove all existing album art (it is possible to have more than one cover in the id3 tag of a file, and that can confuse the head unit), and then hit ok. This takes ages - took me a few days for 15gb worth of music doing a couple of hours at a time when everyone else had gone to bed - but it's the only reliable way I've found to do it. Some odd ones I couldn't find a square version of, so the answer to that is to get the nearest you can and crop the thing to a square ratio in paintbrush (or similar), save as a jpeg, and then embed into the tag.

 

4. By this stage you should have a load of mp3 files which are normalised properly relative to one another, at your preferred target decibel level, with some nice square album art which will fill the box on the screen and a load of properly-filled-in id3 tags. The last stage is to use Sanse Art Sizer as mentioned above (thanks again Andy) to bring your nice square pictures down to a standard size. I go for 300x300 at 85% quality, and I've yet to have one which doesn't display.

 

And that's it. I've found that once you do this with all your existing music, doing it as you acquire more takes a couple of minutes per new album.

[nickcoll]

See my post at http://www.briskoda.net/forums/topic/352705-bolero-album-art/?p=4230911 for the Macintosh version of most of this. Also note that I believe what you need to aim at is artwork that is JPEG format (not PNG or anything else), a maximum of 499x499 in pixels, and less than about 150kB in size.

Edited 2 May, 2015 by nickcoll

[WillieHeck]

This issue is really doing my head in.

 

The weird part for me is that none of my Full Albums art shows up on my Amundsen system, for example my 'Adele - 21' folder has every track embedded with a 300x300 cover art tagged in mp3Tag, They were originally sized at 500x500 but after reading CainDingle's detailed post (thx btw  ) I removed the embedded images from each track and re-did them with a 300x300 image.

 

The text part always shows ok but the image refuses to do so...on ANY folder that has an entire album in it, BUT....I also have folders with '80s Hits', '90s Hits' etc, with individual artists and songs, and the art on every single one of those songs shows up fine when playing - regardless of the embedded image sizes (they're all square images, but of varying sizes)

 

But when it comes to a folder that has a full album in it...no chance, just a generic icon of the source (SD, Jukebox etc....)

 

Grrrrrr 

Edited 5 August, 2015 by WillieHeck

[nickcoll]

I can practically guarantee that your problem is that the image is too large in disk space terms. You need to make sure that the image is less than about 128k in size, and less than 500x500 pixels in dimensions. I think you will probably find that although your image is only 300x300, it is bigger than 128k. The other issue may be the format of the image - are you sure it is JPEG rather than PNG, GIF, or anything else?

 

The way to get the image below 128k in size is to play with the compression factor, which the software you use should enable you to do. Hopefully it will also show you the effect on the image size when you alter the compression.

[Jock]

My Amundsen displays some album art and ignores others.  I haven't bothered to research the criteria yet, but all I did was to create an "Octavia Playlist" in iTunes on my iMac, then drop stuff in there.

 

Then I dragged the playlist from iTunes into the SD card - simples!

 

I'll have a look at the file structure on the SD card when I have a few minutes and see if file size is indeed the issue.