V20: Album art not showing in music player

I've been researching this for a while and it seems Music Player isn't parsing the tags properly. Deleting all other tags (comments, composers, etc) except the main ones (title, track, album, track#, etc) does help. I've embeded all album arts in all the tracks. It so far works for 99% of all my tracks. Still working on why that 1%er doesn't work.

I've also noticed the Music Player does NOT suppot special characters in the filename. I use WinAmp to sync, and during the sync, the special chars are replaced with underscore. Doing so, the next time I sync, the track is not found and needs to be deleted and re-synced everytime.

I have the N97 V20 from the US.

I think that a better solution than putting the album art into the album folder on your phone. If you decided to do so and didn't want the album to show in your image album, you'll need to set the album art to "hidden" with a tool like x-plorer. Hope this helps.

Bottom line, Nokia needs to send out a new version of the Music Player.

I find out, that aparently your mp3 files id3 tags need to be saved in 2.3 version, instead of 2.4, plus cover art images needs to be included in every single file ( this ofcourse if you don't want to save images in folders).

What I've found out:

When I connect my N97 to the PC via "Media Transfer Mode" (shown as MTP device in Windows explorer) and copy my music to the N97 it doesn't recognize the album names, everything is listed under "unknown" in the player.

When I copy the same files via mass storage mode everything is fine.

colin37400 wrote:I'm just wondering whether anyone else has this problem.

When a track is playing in the music player, the album art shows on the "now playing" screen. But in the various lists - for example under "albums" in the music library, only one or two albums appear with the artwork next to the album name. On all the rest (99% of what I've got on the phone) I just get the generic Nokia music track symbol (grey disk with a pink musical note next to it).

Any suggestions to solve this?

Colin, I had the same problem

Try this, it worked for me

If your Music files have Embedded Album Art (ie the album art Jpeg is not a separate file to the music file)

• Create a new music folder on your phone in either the MASS Memory or the Memory Card depending where you usually store your music files - Make sure this is a new and unique folder name eg old one was "Music" new one is "Music Folder"
• Transfer all your music files to your PC
• Delete the old music folder/s
• Transfer the music files back to the Phone into the new folder you created
• Start music player and Refresh Library

The reason this works apparently is that it forces the music player database to treat all the files as new music files and therefore recompile the database thus recognising the album art for the menus as well as for the now playing function.
If you have just updated the phone from V12 to V20 then music player just uses the info in the old database which did not compile the menu album art into it (album art in the menu's did not exist until the V20 FW update). Make sense? It does to me!!

(Tech Experts: Feel free to correct me if i'm wrong!)

If your music does not have embedded album art do this to add embedded album art (don't use the music player to change the album art or you will have to do it again if you move the file or update the phones firmware - the same goes for editing the 'song details' via music player in that it doesn't actually change the file just the music player's data base 😉)

• Download a music file tag editor such as tag and rename found here http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm or here http://download.cnet.com/Tag-Rename/3000-2141_4-10041852.html

  This is a 30 day trial but is fully functional and is what i used!!😃

• Transfer music to PC where it can be found easily
• Open Tag and Rename(T&R) and locate music files on PC
• From T&R choose a song to edit and right click and select 'Edit File Tag'
• In 'General Tab' edit the details for Title, Artist and Album as a minimum.

  These tips apply to the phone Music Player but will apply for other music players as well

  - If there is no Album Name then name it the same as the Title or it will be filed by music player in the Unknown Album tab with all the others that are blank - it will show as either the Nokia unknown symbol or the album art for 1 of the unknown album artists.

  - Avoid leaving the Album or Artist name as Various or Greatest Hits again as all artists with albums of this title will end up being placed in the same album by music player - therefore not showing the right album art.

  If 2 artists album titles are the same but you really want to keep them with the same album titles then re-tag all songs for one slightly different than the other eg artist 1 = Greatest Hits and artist 2 = Greatest Hit's (artist 2's tags have an apostrophe!) then they will display their respective album art separately

• Also on the right in this tab is an area entitled 'Art' Drag and Drop your Album Art onto here - it will appear in this space when it has been carried out correctly

  - If you don't have any album art go to a site such as Amazon, search for your album and open that page, right click over the picture you want and select save as. rename the file to your liking and save to a folder that you can easily find it from.

  - Also try wikipedia for older albums

  -Tip open up the folder with the album art in via windows explorer and view in thumb nail mode, drag and drop the album art jpeg onto the art section of T&R from here

• In the 'Additional' Tab add the Album Artist Name (needed for Windows Media Player apparently)
• Select 'save' or 'save and next' if you have a list to edit
• Once complete create a new music folder on your phone with a completely different name to the current one/s - either on Mass Memory or on a Memory Card
• Delete the old music folder/s on your Phone
• Transfer your edited music files back to the phone and place in the newly created music folder
• Start Music player and select Refresh library

It can be quite laborious if you have lots of files without album art - but in the long run once you have embedded the album art onto the music file it will never have to be carried out again

Hope this helped:icon14:

If anyone else has any tips please add!!!!!

Very good post above. To add, I forgot to mention it my self, images got to be in no more than 200 by 200 pixel in size, and depending if your tag editor allows shoud be set as 'cover front' type.

nouniques wrote: images got to be in no more than 200 by 200 pixel in size, and depending if your tag editor allows should be set as 'cover front' type.

Thanks for the your comments and a good spot on the file sizes, the size of the files Amazon have on their site work ok (where i got my missing files) - not sure if this is because Tag and Rename resizes them though.

Also you quite rightly point out that the image files have to be tagged as the 'cover' image - Tag and Rename automatically puts the picture files as 'cover' images but on other music tagging programs you have to select this yourself.

This is true of EasyTag (This app only works on MP3 Files that's why i went for T&R) where you can add and specify lots of different images to be embedded within the music file in addition to the Cover image.

TurtlePower wrote:Colin, I had the same problem

Try this, it worked for me

If your Music files have Embedded Album Art (ie the album art Jpeg is not a separate file to the music file)

• Create a new music folder on your phone in either the MASS Memory or the Memory Card depending where you usually store your music files - Make sure this is a new and unique folder name eg old one was "Music" new one is "Music Folder"
• Transfer all your music files to your PC
• Delete the old music folder/s
• Transfer the music files back to the Phone into the new folder you created
• Start music player and Refresh Library

The reason this works apparently is that it forces the music player database to treat all the files as new music files and therefore recompile the database thus recognising the album art for the menus as well as for the now playing function.
If you have just updated the phone from V12 to V20 then music player just uses the info in the old database which did not compile the menu album art into it (album art in the menu's did not exist until the V20 FW update). Make sense? It does to me!!

(Tech Experts: Feel free to correct me if i'm wrong!)

Thanks for this.
I'm fairly sure my music has the album artwork embedded (how can I check this for definite?).

Is there any reason that the music has to be transferred back to a PC (mac in my case) and then back over to the phone?

I tried creating a new folder on the phone, and moving one album into that (album disappeared off the list), and then refreshing the music library (sucessfully added back into the list), but this didn't seem to work - the artwork still doesn't show in the albums list.

Also ... I seem to remember that after doing the FW update (and a hard reset) I had to make it refresh the music library because it had disappeared. Would it not have compiled a new database at this point?

Try

transfer a song that shows up album art in the 'now playing' window on the phone music player but not in the album menu to your pc/mac

then play in the music player on the pc/mac if it has embedded album art it should show it when playing the song

I'm sure there is an easier way than this but i dont know it!

the reason it would probably work better to transfer it off the phone (using cut and paste in windows explorer) is that you ultimately are deleting the music files and the folder from the phone and therefore from the database.

by then transfering it back with new folder name you create a new and unique database entry - there is no chance the phone will reuse the previous database enties and leave you at square one.

the firmware update will not erase all the old data on your phone - i would guess that the music player database is one of those files that is kept - with regards to the hard reset i'm not sure to the extent that the reset deals with these type of files - if it completely resets and delets everything then your album art should have shown if it was embedded, if you then restored some settings chances are you may have also restored the music player database.

how are you transfering the music? i did it the old fashioned way basically by copying the files from the phone to my pc with windows explorer and back again (into the new folder) again by windows explorer. Using ovi suite or nokia pc suite may again transfer settings from previous databases with the music files.

hope that some of these suggestions prove fruitful!!

nouniques wrote:...be in no more than 200 by 200 pixel in size,..

I'm using "Tag & Rename" to tag my music, cover art is embedded with 300x300px, and I only copy them in mass storage mode (got some problems when syncing them).

Atm I have more than 1000 songs on my N97 and there is not a single file that's not working.