Enable view system files as well

 

Thanks Mr Vee :clap:

 

I can now see the art for some folders, largest so far seems about 200 x 197 and that is shown as 'Large' !! the small is tiny....

Nice thread resurrection!

 

I just recently re-ripped all of my CD's using Sony MediaGo software (its a free download for PC and Mac) so now its all 256kbit AAC (m4a). This software just seems to work better than iTunes. It got nearly all the album info right first time and most tracks got the album art embedded too. Thank you Sony

This was causing me major grief as well until I tried TDIum's suggestion. Downloaded MedioGo, let it import my music from Itunes, then exported to SD card. Everything is there, music and album art. No other conversions required.

Thanks TDIum.

Also downloaded MediaGo, thanks also to TDIum for that gem.

It found a lot more album artwork but I was still missing some. I found that:

 

https://www.discogs.com

 

was also very useful so am now only about 10 missing. Bit short on 78's though

 

Haven't tried it in the car yet; its Peeeeing it down outside.......

Edited 27 March, 201610 yr by ajw1100

With your help I can now see the artwork for many of my folders, next thing to sort out is how to get the Amundsen to actually mix folders/tracks. I have in the set up ticked to mix folders but it seems to want to stick to the folder I originally selected which is not what I want. Would the only way to properly make all tracks play randomly be to copy all the contents of all the folders into one ginormous folder? And would the right artwork still relate to the right tracks?

You can easily resize album art in The Microsoft Paint program.

With your help I can now see the artwork for many of my folders, next thing to sort out is how to get the Amundsen to actually mix folders/tracks. I have in the set up ticked to mix folders but it seems to want to stick to the folder I originally selected which is not what I want. Would the only way to properly make all tracks play randomly be to copy all the contents of all the folders into one ginormous folder? And would the right artwork still relate to the right tracks?

 

Have you thought about using playlists? A quick check of my Bolero pdf says it supports "m3u, pls, wpl, m3u8; asx" formats and it may support others.

 

You may be able to put all of your music into one big playlist and then set that to random play. There are various ways of building playlists (but I am not experienced in this and by no means an expert).

It seems Playlists are not usable with the Amundsen, they are not mentioned in the Infotainment guide at all, and nothing in the index either. I seems the USB will only play folders in alphabetical order, so will not mix folders only tracks within the folders. I tried mixing album tracks and all artwork from 4 albums into one folder, no matter what track played only one artwork was displayed so that failed as well.

I am sure my old Avensis played randomly and displayed the right artwork.

 

Another minus point for Skoda at car renewal.....

It seems Playlists are not usable with the Amundsen, they are not mentioned in the Infotainment guide at all, and nothing in the index either.

I'm sure mine supports playlists. I'll check in a bit.

Are you in folder view or database view?

Sometimes the software will support something that is not mentioned in the manual. Give it a try? 

As I thought, my Amundsen shows the following in database view.

Playlists

Artists

Albums

Genres

Tracks

As I thought, my Amundsen shows the following in database view.

Playlists

Artists

Albums

Genres

Tracks

 

Well, searched every Media option I could find this morning and cannot find a 'database' view anywhere! Maybe I did not tick that option box!!

 

How do you access the database view?

How do you access the database view?

I'm not near the car right now but from memory if you're in folder view, and I assume you are, navigate back up to the top level and there should be an option there to show database view.

Hi Prog.

 

Did you find out how you accessed the database? I have tried again but gave up. I would still like to play mixed/assorted folders but with the right folder artwork for the tracks.

It's in the post two up from this.

 

 

With your help I can now see the artwork for many of my folders, next thing to sort out is how to get the Amundsen to actually mix folders/tracks. I have in the set up ticked to mix folders but it seems to want to stick to the folder I originally selected which is not what I want. Would the only way to properly make all tracks play randomly be to copy all the contents of all the folders into one ginormous folder? And would the right artwork still relate to the right tracks?

 

The easiest way to have the Amundsen play random tracks/folders is to put an mp3 song before the folders you want to have randomly played, or in the root.

For instance, if you have the following structure:

 

Folder 1

Folder 2

 

 

With your help I can now see the artwork for many of my folders, next thing to sort out is how to get the Amundsen to actually mix folders/tracks. I have in the set up ticked to mix folders but it seems to want to stick to the folder I originally selected which is not what I want. Would the only way to properly make all tracks play randomly be to copy all the contents of all the folders into one ginormous folder? And would the right artwork still relate to the right tracks?

 

The easiest way to have the Amundsen play random tracks/folders is to put an mp3 song before the folders you want to have randomly played, or in the root.

For instance, if you have the following structure:

 

Folder 1

Folder 2

     Folder 3

     Folder 4

 

if you put an mp3 song here into Folder 2:

 

Folder 1

Folder 2

     song.mp3

     Folder 3

     Folder 4

 

All the mp3 files in Folder 3 and Folder 4 will be played randomly

 

If instead you put a song here:

 

song.mp3

Folder 1

Folder 2

     Folder 3

     Folder 4

 

You will listen randomly to all the songs you have

Thanks ciclista71 for that suggestion, I have been playing around with playlists from WMP. I had 4 lists and found the Amundsen played one fine but the others it could not find the tracks although the albums were there and played fine by themselves, also the same playlist was no problem on my PC.

 

I will have to try a few options, I have a couple of spare memory sticks so will do as you suggest, hopefully that will end my problems.....

Play lists can reference the music files by absolute or relative path names. Possibly yours has absolute pathnames to the files when they were on your PC.

Well, not exactly sure what I did (or didn't) as I have somehow got a couple of play lists to play I deleted the list that did not play on the Amundsen and copied in a new list from WMP but no all showed as playable as some tracks were 'File not found'. I imported the playlist again and this time it seems to have all the tracks.

 

I did not twig the problem as I was looking at the top of the folder tree for the playlists, I eventually found the 'My Playlists' folder which was empty so assumed that I did not have one. Later I found another folder labelled 'Playlists' which of course had my lists!!

 

Thanks for your help guys.

Edited 12 April, 201610 yr by ajw1100

The correct way to have the cover art appear in every MP3 is the following:

- image must have a maximum size of 500x500 pixel

- image file size must not exceed 200KB

- image must not be progressive. (It took me a while to understand this)

 

 

Guys,

I recently found out there is another detail to take care about: the jpeg must not include any comment, so no 0xFFFE (COM) header should be present in the image otherwise the car stereo will not show the picture. This can be easily removed with jhead -dc <filename> under Mac OS or, under Windows, I used paint.net to open the image and re-save it (the COM header will be automatically stripped).

 

Cheers

Hi guys.

After a bit of messing about I have finally come up with a solution that works for me. No need for mp3 tags or downloading other apps or software.

I used Windows Media Player and an SD card as big as you can manage.

 

1. Use media player to rip the cd you want.

2. Close media player.

3. Open "My PC"  and locate the music folder. There should be a a file with the album you just ripped.

4. Copy and paste the file to your SD card. Don't sync the albums to the SD Card with Windows Media Player as it won't copy the art work.

5. When you put the card in SD Card slot 2 and select SD card through media it will show the album and the art work.

6.Repeat for all the albums you want and when you load the card they should all show.

 

No need for extra files, or downloading MP3 tagging software etc etc etc. Amundsen now works as it should and I dont need to worry about Ipod cables or Ipods discharging cos I forgot to turn it off after using it on bluetooth. 

 

Also I found that when started to use my phone with the  car it would not read my contacts off my Samsung S4. I eventually had to download an app called "Bluetooth Phonebook" from playstore - looks like a green book with the bluetooth logo on the cover.£1.29 I think, but works great. 

Apologies if this is already known but i spent ages reading the forum and trying lots of solutions that just didnt work for me. 

Hi guys.

After a bit of messing about I have finally come up with a solution that works for me. No need for mp3 tags or downloading other apps or software.

I used Windows Media Player and an SD card as big as you can ...........etc.

Had same problem on Columbus i.e. every now and again it would default to standard Skoda album pic. No success with Media Player, although I was using Windows 1O (not fully compatible). In the end I converted all my rips etc to mp3 and used tagging, album art grabber and album art resizer as suggested by other posts. MP3 tags were required, as well as a limit on album art dimensions and occupied memory size and whilst necessary for Columbus, similar may apply to Amundsen.

Had same problem on Columbus i.e. every now and again it would default to standard Skoda album pic. No success with Media Player, although I was using Windows 1O (not fully compatible). In the end I converted all my rips etc to mp3 and used tagging, album art grabber and album art resizer as suggested by other posts. MP3 tags were required, as well as a limit on album art dimensions and occupied memory size and whilst necessary for Columbus, similar may apply to Amundsen.

glad you have found a solution that works. i am also using windows 10 and media player. its the only thing that has worked for me. tried lots of solutions posted here but none worked. 

dont know why the amundsen unit is so picky with stuff like art work and phone contacts. its a bang up to date unit so it should be easy to intergrate simple art work  etc.

Also I found that when started to use my phone with the car it would not read my contacts off my Samsung S4. I eventually had to download an app called "Bluetooth Phonebook" from playstore - looks like a green book with the bluetooth logo on the cover.£1.29 I think, but works great.

Apologies if this is already known but i spent ages reading the forum and trying lots of solutions that just didnt work for me.

I have similar problem on columbus and Note4. I solved this

Contacts were divided into groups: Frend, family etc. For some reason only contacts in default group "My Contacts" was synchronized.

The solution is either to all the contacts put to the group " My Contacts" or to put them to another group and in to "My Group"

Sorry for my English

Edited 11 November, 20169 yr by Ferdinand01

Art work is not something that many MP3 rippers necessarily put in the correct place (it should be embedded in the file itself) and considering the number of options for formatting, I'm not surprised at all that there are issues here. PNG and JPG are massively different, there are many different flavours of JPG... and even then, if I remember correctly it's actually an extended tag so not necessarily supported anywhere.

I've just re-sorted a massive playlist I have - a playlist on Foobar2000, which I can drag and drop onto the phone or USB stick - and that now has the art embedded into the specific files, as they're all in one massive directory with 2000+ tracks. That on shuffle is an easy way to do things. That required Album art downloader, Foobar, and MP3Tag to get that set up and even then, some art doesn't show correctly. Most does, though, which was the point. MP3Tag is incredibly powerful and combined with discogs, amazon and freedb, has pretty much all of my albums. I also had to do some re-sorting of various artist albums where the downloaded tags were artist // title instead of title // artist, and MP3Tag sorted that, too. Strong recommend on that particular piece of software.

Foobar will also actually rip CDs accurately and check that they are accurate if you want, something I'm not convinced WMP can do. But then, I've avoided that for years. Awful thing, just like using WMA for quality rips. Urgh. FLAC all the way. But I digress.

 

I am surprised to see the contacts issue - BT has been around since 2003 and all my devices have never had a problem with any of the numerous rentals I drive. The Octy shows the photos from the phone, too, which is cute... I understand the group thing, but not really. It should just be a permissions thing (allow the Skoda to access the Contacts and recent call list every time) and that *ought* to be it. 

 

  - Bret