I have basically given up myself. The demand is that unless we can produce "consistent" improper displays of our artwork, then there is no bug, when in fact, it is the inconsistency *itself* that is the bug. In my experience, MM just seems to "tire" of displaying an artwork file. It will display it two or three or six or seven times or so, then it will simply...stop. I have to write down the songs that are affected, then go back into MM, reaffirm the artwork file, then resync to my phone. Most of the time this works, but sometimes it doesn't. This is even more bizarre when it's just one song on an album sharing the artwork file on all songs.

As I stated in my original post, I believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with MM's entire artwork subsystem. I would be willing to bring my files up to standard (if that is indeed part of the problem), but so far, despite many releases of MM since I originally purchased, nothing has changed.

I observe (with envy) how each an every tune on each and every channel of SiriusXM displays nice artwork. I wonder how they do it? Maybe MM's dev team could ask?

I have given up on MM artwork standard configuration. For my preferred view in my Collections, which is a listing of albums, with sub-listing of Tracks, my leftmost column is "Artwork" and right sidebar is Selected/Playing Track. This way I can always see the artwork of the album, and artwork of the selected track on the sidebar, which are frequently different as I use the track's Single Release covers (or alternate art) as the track artwork. For the consistent "Album" art per album, I created a pseudo track as an album placeholder for each album to contain the album artwork. 00.0 length MP3. This placeholder is set as Track 0 to be listed first (hence always used by MM as album art; other tracks must be 1 or higher, not blank); TYPE = podcast (which I don't use for anything else), with Title and Artist set to blank (to avoid visual clutter in my listing view).

Hi,
MMA currently do not work per track album art, but per album and paths can be modified to contain single track per folder and make album art work as per single track.

For my daughter I changed destination path to "\Music\<Title>\<Artist> - <Title>", set to save album art to folder.jpg and to tags

As she uses MMA as primary music app I resynced all tracks that resulted in each track have own album art.

Lastly if you find the way how to replicate those 20% constantly then we have a bug in our hands to fix.

Pavie:

I sort of understand what the path means, but are you saying that my settings are incorrect for this path and that's why I'm having the problem? If so, why is it that 80% of the library is correct and the other 20% not correct? I have never changed anything about the default settings in MM other than to take Lowlander's advice and create actual files for the artwork instead of relying on only embedding.

Currently, the add artwork process I use creates and stores files in the same folder as the song is in (I assign artwork to *songs*, not only to albums). These songs many times stored in a master folder that is labeled per artist. However, MM creates a separate .THM file that seems to be given the name of the Artist, not the Album, and this is where I suspect that the problem originates. MMW is able to somehow sort this out, but MMA appears to be clueless.

Surely, you can understand that not all people listen to albums only. However, why shouldn't we be able to include a single image for a single song from the album that song came from? And...why does this same process work *most* of the time and not *all* of the time?

Thanks.

Further information...

Yesterday, I spent nearly four (more) hours trying to get to the bottom of how MMA screws up all my artwork. Thanks to some help from Lowlander and others, I have been able to get MMW in line. The artwork links - even though they are still disjointed from one another - are now all in sync and I know what the requirements are to ensure that the art displays per album and per song and per artist and per album artist. Although there are nuances for each of these (which is unfortunate), the behavior is at least consistent, therefore, able to be predicted and managed.

Not so with MMA.

This application is a disaster when it comes to artwork. Not only does it not pay attention to the MMW library, it doesn't even pay attention to ITSELF. That's right. I can look at artwork in a Track listing and see one image, then open up the Properties for that same song and see an entirely different image. Is anyone at MM interested in this? Here goes: the artwork shown in the Properties is correct! Yet, what is displayed in the Track listing - and consequently what is displayed on Android Auto - is a different image.

How can the Properties of a track not be directly linked to the track itself in the Tracks listing? Why would someone architect the sync process to examine more than one source for artwork? However, this gets worse...

The incorrect image gets splayed over a ton of other tracks as well, and the following steps for MMA are useless:

1. Delete the artwork from the track on the phone, but leave Genre and Playlist and resync
2. Delete the Playlist and resync
3. Delete the Genre and resync
4. Delete the Playlist AND the Genre and resync
5. Relink all of the artwork in MMW to itself and resync
6. Making sure that artwork is not only embedded but that a separate file is created and stored in the same folder (this was the magical saving grace from Lowlander that fixed MMA - thanks!) and resync
7. Making sure that the combination of Artist - Album Artist - Album is always unique and resync

As you can expect, performing all these tasks testing for only one variable took a great deal of time - even though the sample set is only 160 songs.

In spite of the above, there wasn't even consistency in terms of how MMA "decided" to fail. For the first few reloads, MMA "chose" the same incorrect image for nearly 90 of the 160 songs. Then, after another experiment reload, MMA chose an entirely different image to load into those 90 songs.

The upshot is that I believe that it is senseless to one-off these problems, talking about nits. Now that we see how to make sure that MMW correctly manages artwork, is it too much to ask to have MMA rearchitected to simply mirror its desktop parent?

Thanks.

To translate:

Save destination file to /Music/ Subfolder Album Artist / Subfolder Album name / and filename format will be 2 numbers Zero Padded (01,02,03,...) then first 20 charaters of Artist name - finally track Title

Hi:

Sorry I didn't see the reply was on another page. I think what I've copied below is the answer to your question. I've never been able to understand what this string means, so I'll leave that up to you.

\Music\<Album Artist>\<Album>\<Track#:2> $Left(<Artist>,20) - <Title>

Thanks!

Hi,
What is your setting you have for Music in Device profile -> Options -> File Location?

Will the URLs display on their own? Let's see...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e0aosrjepp1vu7y/MMA.jpg?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ufty93i9f6xmqfe/MMW.JPG?dl=0

P.S. I inserted Dropbox URLs for the images, but they're not showing up. I clicked the "Notify me" box for responses and the board doesn't notify me when they occur. I pay money for a license to a product that doesn't work.

Welcome to the quality of computer software 40 years into the industry.

Regardless of the "fixes," I've attached two simple photos. These photos were captured after performing a Restore. Plain and simple, no frills: you can see that MMW shows one thing, and that MMA shows another. It's not about what to do to "fix" this particular case. It's about how can this possibly happen in the first place?

With iTunes, although I had problems displaying artwork (it was either there or not), for nearly 60,000 songs, never was there a case where a track was displaying *incorrect* artwork. The fact that there are all these things that I'm supposed to try to fix this problem only means that we're hoping that with one of them, the problem magically goes away, not that we understand how the artwork sync process actually works and what we can do to prevent problems like this from happening in the first place.

Serious offer: $100 to anyone who can fix this problem.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e0aosrjepp1vu7y/MMA.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ufty93i9f6xmqfe/MMW.JPG?dl=0

Yes, I've completely deleted offending files from my phone and attempted to resync. Very rarely, does this work, and interestingly, there are times when I don't get the same error - an error, yes, but not the same one.

My current example of the Hank Snow tracks is a perfect example. Before I started this thread, the three tracks were displaying the artwork for "Old Shep". After I deleted the cache and went through the massive restore, the three tracks now all display the artwork for "I'm Movin' On." To me, this is simply inexplicable that this sync process can perform this poorly.

I had written previously about all the problems sync'ing with a USB cable, and the advice was to ditch USB and use wi-fi, which for me, is considerably slower than the direct cable connection. The switch to wi-fi seemed to take care of the sync operations freezing and dropping as they did with USB (although even the wi-fi goes to abnormal EOJ on occasion), but the artwork transfer isn't nearly as accurate.

I know there is something wrong with this architecture because I have actually removed everything from my phone - music and app - and reinstalled from scratch. I have to endure a massively long restore process, but when it's finished, nearly all of the original errors are still there. In MMW, there are no errors, but on the phone...errors. The fact that the metadata is getting lost in translation means only one thing: MM is not architected to *validate* its processes, only to *perform* them.

Thanks.

Have you tried removing files from device and re-syncing with MMW?

There is only one track per album, since the last time we corresponded you advised me to get rid of the common album names since that might be "confusing" MM. You were correct: ever since I made unique "album" names for singles, MMW is now fixed (with the exception of the problem between the Artwork column in the Main Display and the Selected window). This correction, however, did nothing for MMA. Thanks.

Yes, all three files have the artwork for the "I'm Movin' On" album.