Sending Album Art to iPod... SOLVED, READ WITHIN

holidayidol · Post by **holidayidol** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 10:43 am

Hey guys, here's what I have:

-MediaMonkey 2.5.3.968 (love it!)
-iPod 30Gb, firmaware 1.1.1, newly restored

First of all, everything is perfectly fine with both my software and my iPod, and I'm loving what MediaMonkey is allowing me to accomplish with my iPod.

I've recently been loading my music collection back onto my iPod from the pc harddrive, and I've been using MediaMonkey to both organize the files (fodlers, tags, art, etc) on the harddrive initially and then to transfer the files to the iPod.

I use the Amazon auto-tag feature to find album art and embed it into the tag, and its working just fine. I've made sure all albums/files only get one picture assigned and embedded to the tag.

My only problem is this....whenever I transfer the files (with embedded art) over to the iPod everything is fine except for the album art display. Either the album art doesn't show up on the iPod at all for the newly transfered files, or displays an "empty" box. I did research on the problem in this forum and discovered that if I do the iTunes trick (unchecking 'display album art on iPod', and then rechecking) that it will refresh the artwork database on the iPod, and when I go back to the iPod the artwork then displays fine on the newly transfered tracks.

Wonderful...however, that gets old really quick. The iTunes trick takes 5-10 minutes to finish, and I am having to do this after each series of file transfers to the iPod if I want to be able to see the artwork.

Is there any better fix to this? Am I doing anything wrong? How can I send the files to the iPod and see the artwork immediately without having to do the whole iTunes trick?

dcm693 · Post by **dcm693** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 11:39 am

Try rebuilding the device database. That usually clears up album art problems for me. Right-click on your device in the folder tree and you'll see the option.

holidayidol · Post by **holidayidol** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 12:56 pm

Haha! That made ALL my iPod artwork disappear! Both the newly transferred tracks that I was having trouble with, and all the tracks that displayed artwork fine already.

Oh well, that's ok...I'll give anything a try

The iTunes trick will fix it back to normal. Am I the only one that has this problem?

heinimuecki · Post by **heinimuecki** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 12:58 pm

rebuilding the database works for me too

and i don't have any itunes on my pc (i don't need it

)

holidayidol · Post by **holidayidol** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 1:07 pm

heinimuecki wrote:and i don't have any itunes on my pc (i don't need it )

I also had abandoned iTunes long ago, after getting used to Anapod...and now MediaMonkey. I had to reinstall it though to fix this issue.

If rebuilding the database works for you guys, then why did it make all my artwork disappear? I even made sure that I was patient and let it completely finish rebuilding before I clicked on anything else. (And tried several different times...

)

heinimuecki · Post by **heinimuecki** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 1:24 pm

when you browse to your ipod node and you mark one file
there, is the album art shown correctly? if it's in the tag it should do so.

that would mean it has to do with the ipod database
(to know that will not really help, will it?

)

will it occur when you synch only a small amount?

holidayidol · Post by **holidayidol** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 1:44 pm

heinimuecki wrote:when you browse to your ipod node and you mark one file
there, is the album art shown correctly? if it's in the tag it should do so.

Yes it is. I embed the artwork into the tag while its still on the pc hard drive, and then transfer it to the iPod. I can take a file that will not display artwork on the iPod, and MonkeyMedia can see it fine when I browse that file in the iPod. So far, I've never seen a file on the iPod "lose" this embedded artwork data...but it just doesn't ever display on the iPod until I do the iTunes trick.

heinimuecki wrote:that would mean it has to do with the ipod database

That could indeed be the case. I just found this old thread from February that seems to briefly discuss the exact same issue:
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... ht=rebuild
...there is a suggestion there that it could be the iPod database. It doesn't look like a solution ever evolved from that thread, unfortunately.

heinimuecki wrote:will it occur when you synch only a small amount?

Yes, if I was to transfer just one album to the iPod now, it would transfer fine but the artwork would be an empty box until I do the iPod trick to fix it. No other older album artwork is affected by new transfers, they remain visible...just whatever the new transfer was will not show artwork until I do the iTunes trick.

And, as mentioned before, the downside to that means having to keep iTunes installed, and it takes up to 10 minutes to fix this through iTunes each time.

dcm693 · Post by **dcm693** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 2:02 pm

When you first started using MM, did you start from scractch and restore your iPod (erasing everything on it)? Or did you already have stuff on it from iTunes?

I restored both my "big" iPod and my nano to start them off clean before using MM. I've had the same issue as you where the album art just shows up as a blank square. Luckily for me, a database rebuild fixed it.

holidayidol · Post by **holidayidol** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 2:43 pm

I restored my iPod over the weekend, erasing everything from it.
I opened up the iPod with iTunes before I did anything with MM, but I didn't transfer any tracks with iTunes. I may have transferred the very first tracks with another program called XPlay...maybe that program is similar enough to iTunes.

Since I went through the long and tedious effort of organizing all my files on the hard drive with MM this time, it would be no big deal if I restored/erased my iPod and started from scratch with using only MM to access and transfer files to the iPod. It would be somewhat timely to transfer this many files again, but it would be less time than using iTunes to repair the artwork database over and over again. Do you think doing this would be worth the try?

dcm693 · Post by **dcm693** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 2:55 pm

I can't be sure if it will make a difference, but check this out.

I've been having a problem synching my nano correctly. Not sure what the issue is, but my playcounts are not being correct copied back to my computer. I suspect the issue might be caused by running iTunes while the nano is connected to my computer. I don't even sync using iTunes. I use the podcast manager in iTunes, then synch them using MM. I haven't had a chance to really test this theory yet, but I've restored my nano several times. I haven't turned on iTunes while the nano was attached for about 3 days now and the synching is working correctly so far in MM.

Like I said, I don't know if my theory is correct, but it could be that iTunes does something to the device database when it senses and iPod - something that is not compatible fully with MM.

Just my theory. In your case, I would restore the iPod and start from scratch. It will be time-consuming, but you'll only need to do it once and hopefully the issues will be gone.

heinimuecki · Post by **heinimuecki** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 2:58 pm

i think this could be the way. but first of all wipe itunes if you don't need the video stuff

if you restore the ipod to factory defaults then let MM do the rest.
so i would suggest restore the ipod with the latest updater, connect it to your pc and after MM recognized it set up the device configuration.

under the "Device configuration" Tab i have checked the
"Force iTunes-style folders (\iPod_Control\Music\F00\, etc.)",
"Trim path and/or filename length to 31" and
"Update database based on all Track changes (takes longer)".

and that works for me (i hope for you too) with my ipod color.
but if you need videos on the ipod i don't know if there is an other way
to get them on it except with itunes

.

Vertigo50 · Post by **Vertigo50** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 10:47 am

One thing to check before you do all the restoring...

When you're done transferring in MM, are you clicking "Safely Remove Device" WITHIN MediaMonkey?

I found that if I unmounted the ipod outside of MM, it sometimes did things like this.

holidayidol · Post by **holidayidol** » Wed Jun 21, 2006 8:07 am

Ok guys, I've been down a LONG road to recovery !

First of all I tried each and every suggestion above. After I completely abolished all things iTunes (and any other iPod software) from my system, formatted/restored my iPod, and used MM as the sole proprietor to rebuild my iPod...you can imagine my distress when there was STILL no album artwork displayed after transfer, but only the "empty" box!!!

But that's all ok. It lead me down a tough path of worthwhile troubleshooting. To make a long story short, the solution to my problem (and likely many others with the same issue) was that I was transferring the songs to the iPod through the My Computer node instead of through the Library Database. I knew this all along, and it was intentional, but I didn't think it mattered which way. When you transfer files from the My Computer node you are still pressing a button that says "Sync to iPod", but apparently it syncs in a manner that writes to the iPod database in a slightly different manner.

It's all good now, though. All artwork files show up on initial transfer with no further a-do, and I'm organized even further by using the MM Library.

I do have a question, though. It really was a shortcut to me (in both time and organizational efforts) to be able to transfer files directly from the My Computer node... instead of adding them to the Library database initially, and then sync'ing them. Will it ever be possible within MM to transfer/sync from the My Computer node, and have it write to the iPod database in the exact same manner that it does from the Library ?

Also, please forgive me if I've mispoken in any way in my understanding of the MM vs iPod databases. But this has certainly fixed my issue.

Thanks to all who helped me in this thread!

dcm693 · Post by **dcm693** » Wed Jun 21, 2006 8:15 am

Well that's good to know. I didn't realize there were that many different ways to sync in MM.

Teknojnky · Post by **Teknojnky** » Wed Jun 21, 2006 10:25 am

Holidayidol, I would send an email to the dev's support email address (s u p p o r t at mediamonkey . com without all the spaces) with your findings (if they don't notice and reply here), its possibly a bug and not something intentional.