[Mike-o-Matic]

Here's a shout-out to any gurus, with 2012 model year Volts that are equipped with the non-nav radio and MyLink.

Supposedly, according to the fluffy manual and a bunch of marketing materials, MyLink will access Gracenote and get any missing metadata and/or cover art, while preferring what you supply before attempting to locate it. Now, that sounds nice in marketspeak... but certain technical details are not supplied. Like, for example, WHERE to put cover art, and WHAT to name it.

Each of my albums has a cover art file in its respective folder. I've tried naming it albumart.jpg, cover.jpg, and folder.jpg (which works on all my .mp3 players). Yet, unless it's a fairly popular album, meaning Gracenote is likely to have cover art for it, then I'll never see my (own) cover art.

I am of the belief that when I DO see cover art, which is probably 70% of the time, it's because Gracenote is supplying their cover-art image. MyLink is showing THEIRS, not mine. That when Gracenote doesn't have one, I see just the USB symbol. I have yet to try using a "marked" image to prove this theory, however.

Anybody know what I'm doing wrong??!?

Not that it matters (maybe?), but this is on a 8MB USB stick with about 2000 songs. I'm going to be upgrading to 16MB or 32MB soon and want to understand the problem before applying my entire collection.

 

[Henry_FL]

with mp3's cover art is embedded into the file ( tag & rename will do the embedding for you ). Using a file in the same folder is not part of the cover art, though there maybe players that search the local folder for a jpeg

 

[drbruns]

I use an iPod Touch. If I have an album without art, I find it and paste it into the artwork section of iTunes and then copy it to the iPod. The Volt hasn't had a problem displaying it this way.

Unknowingly, I did have a couple albums that did not have album art in iTunes which I discovered when one of the songs was playing in the Volt. Gracenote did not find it, so I went back to iTunes and inserted it.

 

[Mike-o-Matic]

Ah, thanks Henry, I was afraid I might have to do some embedding.

Earlier tonight I put in a call to the Volt advisors about this. They're having a MyLink guru call me tomorrow. We'll see if they say the same thing, I reckon.

Now, the OTHER problem I had is that Gracenote mistook one of my artists and overrode my ID3 tags. Specifically, my USB stick has Gordon Lightfoot's "Endless Wire" album on it, and MyLink ignored the tags and claimed it was by The Who! Yes, The Who also have an album named "Endless Wire" but this was not that album. Not even close But, that's a completely different problem from the album art problem (misidentification, that is). I turned off "normalization" and the problem cleared up; Lightfoot is now shown as the artist. However the wrong album art is still showing. Guess I'll have to play around with it some more.

Thanks for the feedback, fellows!

 

[Mike-o-Matic]

Followup:

I did some testing with a few hundred tracks, and had much better luck (complete success?) with embedded album art. Henry, thanks so much for the tip. I will pass this information along to the Volt advisor that calls me tomorrow, (assuming he or she doesn't already know about this nice little nugget) and they can pass it along to others.

Would have been nice if they'd put this in the dang MyLink manual, though! (perhaps they did, and I missed it when reading the manual ... but I'm pretty sure it's not mentioned).

Now I just have to re-tag ALL of my songs! I tried out "MP3Tag" did it really fast and without much effort. Link: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

And here's a nice tutorial on how to use MP3Tag to embed all your cover art. Found out how to do that... the hard way. Lots of programs let you manipulate the embedded artwork, but this was fast and to-the-point.

http://www.geektonic.com/2008/02/automatically-embed-album-art-to-large.html

NOTE: The selection they mention "Shift-Alt-F5" (for "select action type") seems to have changed to "Shift-Alt-F6" (for "Actions (Quick)") sometime since the tutorial was written.

I am getting too tired to write quickly & coherently... eyes drooping... goodnight all!