Notices

A problems seems to exist with most of the Tablet Media Players regarding how they handle embedded album art in id3 tags - they don't appear to at all.

I did a simple test of the Album Art handling last night.

I ripped some CDs using iTunes - I decided to use this as I expect that world-wide the majority of rippers will use it ( I don't usually as I said in a post elsewhere) iTunes tells me these are id3 tags v2.2 and each file appears to contain the album art. I ripped them to a completely separate folder to any other files. I then tried to play and display.

First on the PC

iTunes - Obviouly displayed the album Art

Musicmatch - Failed to show the covers

Windows Media Player - Failed to show the covers

WinAmp - Showed the covers perfectly


On the N800 running OS2008 - wifi/bluetooth was disable to avoid any downloads of art off the web.

UKMP, Kagu and Mediabox - All failed to display the art in the id3 tags, mostly just showing a shinning disc icon instead.

Canola2 doesn't display any art yet - that's coming.

I think that Canola2 (well any player) should display art embedded in the tags - is this reasonable? Obviously it appears that id3 tags are pretty variable in content as far as album art is concerned. Mine have all been ripped from CDs and by only 2 or 3 ripper progs (mostly Musicmatch) - some Albums seem to have the art in the album folder as a small jpg image, some have a jpg in a seperate folder within the album folder.

I personally don't want Canola2 to download images for me, I can do that when I create the mp3s. Those players I have tried on the tablet that do download have often ignored my art and then substituted an incorrect cover art. I just want whatever is with the mp3 file (whatever way) to display correctly.

Thanks again to the guys developing Canola2 - not only is it a great app but I appreciate the way team seem to operate in a listening way. I can't wait for the developing prog.

Add the next version of MediaBox (0.93) to the list of players showing embedded album art.

I think the reason why so many programs have trouble with this is that there is no single standard for embedding album art in an ID3 tag. For one, ID3 changes its format very much with every new version, making it hard to write readers that understand all ID3 versions. Then, embedded album art can be any file type, not just PNG or JPEG. It can be stored compressed or uncompressed, can be tagged with a type (cover art, artist picture, ...), can be encrypted, etc.
ID3 is hell!

there is a way to get canola 2 to show album art , though not embedded , got an album cover for everything on mine. and kagu has its own art downloader , so what is the big deal?

HI - Can you tell me how to get Canola to see the album art. It doesn't see it any of the mp3 files I have tried so far, embedded, seperate jpg or jpg in internal folder. When I asked the Canola2 team a week ago I was told that album art was not yet supported so your help would be appreciated. Canola1 showed my art OK.

As for the downloader in Kagu - as I stated in my original post it isn't always the correct art and it isn't complete (as you might expect from an online dB). Pretty clever though.

Check this project out for Canola.

https://garage.maemo.org/projects/canola-tuning/

Thanks for that Pycage - I didn't realise it was quite so complicated, though I did realise there were a few different flavours of id3 tag around. I can see how it is a nightmare for developers.

Thanks namtastic - I downloaded the latest .deb and launched off. A very clever and elegant project. It downloaded a great deal of art, most of it correct, but with some rather odd glitches.

It correctly found cover art for Kristina Kulukundis and Alice Martineau (sadly no longer with us), both ladies a little on the fringes, and then fails to find art for two Sting albums (though some others OK), Shakira, The definitive Ray Charles, and a Jackson Browne album. A far as I can see it only added one incorrect cover out of the 40 or so on there for testing.

The problem now is can I add manually for those missing and can I "edit" any of the art put on?? Isn't life interesting!!??

Thanks again for pointing me to this great project.

Poke around in ~/.canola/covers/ -- it downloads a few alternates when it does the search so the right one might already be in there.

cover and cover-small are the ones the player loads.

cover-1, cover-2, cover-3, cover-4 are the large images, and
cover-small-1, cover-small-2, cover-small-3, cover-small-4 are, well, duh.

Thing is, if the scanner chose #2, all it did was duplicate "cover-2.jpg" and rename it to "cover.jpg", so you can do the same.

i made a guide for manually downloading and placing art in the covers folder , if you want it , pm me with your email , using the downloader eats the hell out of your availible memory.

Hi guys,

As I previous said : we are really aware of album art issues. And as you also probably heard we are a small company and we need to comply with some legal rules, and downloading album art is one that gives problems.

But let's move on :

1) we are trying to figure out how to do that (downloading album art) without legal hassle. Also I believe is not only mass downloading, but also being able to change a wrong downloaded cover specifically when needed (the drag album interaction will be used for this). That's why there's the cover-N.jpg. So you could visually choose from it.

2) I think with the filescanner that we have for the media library we could also in the future make a "pick" cover from disk feature, where you could point the cover file.
We don't think it would be easy to auto do it, because naming / orgaqnization can be really different for each one.

3) Embbeded album : Canola1 supported that, but as pycage said it is really problematic, so we can indeed try do implement something (it will for sure be implemented in future releases) but we cannot make sure it will work with all versions that easily.

In the end album art is a little bit more complicated than it sounds, as people comes from different media player, with different formats (itc, id3 art, png, jpg, gif, etc) and we a really trying to figure out what will be the best option. For sure someone is going to be out, but this is the real world : we cannot please everyone : /

BR

Marcelo