WP8 album art

garak0410

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The missing album arts seems mostly on my own, personal music and not Zune/XBOX Music pass, though I've seen a few of them with missing art. And usually it is from syncing with the Desktop Win Phone 8 app.

So, I decided to remove a playlist for RUSH and just download them directly on my phone and set up a playlist using that convoluted "add to now playing" and save as playlist method. So, started to do that and I was getting album art but then I ran into a few albums that have those "album only" songs and just gave up.

The album art needs to get fixed!
 

Daimy0

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MPATool app lets you manually dload Album Art to each artist from your phone.....Only need to send your Windows Live email address to the creator...
Thread is is the XDA developers forum and the app works amazing....
 

nzmike

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I MAY HAVE THE ANSWER! (oops, sorry to shout!)

I discovered that when I had both "folder.jpg" and "AlbumArtsmall.jpg" in the folder for an album on my PC it got shown correctly on my Lumia 920 when I copied it over.

If *only* "folder.jpg" was there the artwork would show in the list of albums (in the WP8 Music app) but when selected to play the album art wouldn't show. If I then copied "folder.jpg" to "AlbumArtSmall.jpg" the artwork appeared correctly when the album was selected (and all this happened vice versa too).

So I ended up writing a WPF app to go through all my music folders on my PC and download missing artwork from Last.FM (using their API) and saving it to both "folder.jpg" and "AlbumArtsmall.jpg". For the artwork Last.FM couldn't find (it's *REALLY* fussy about artist and album name!) I used Amazon/Google images to find it and just dragged the cover image into the correct folder, renamed it folder.jpg and copied it to "AlbumArtSmall.jpg". It took me a whole weekend to get it right and update all my album art but now when I copy folders from my Music folder on my PC to the 920 the artwork appears correctly for all the albums I found artwork for.

So, as far I can see, you need *both* files in the album folder for the artwork to show up.... works for me anyway. :)

I then sync via WMP and all is good.

You can also get the artwork via WMP using the "update album details" or "find details" items when you right click on an album - BUT a word of warning!!! Beware of updating album details in this way - it may find the artwork but it often changes the genre and other details without asking or telling you! I ended up with many albums with two lots of genre/artist/title because WMP updated some of the tracks and not others!!! Very very *&^%ing annoying and you don't get an option what to update in WMP - typical bl00dy Microsoft - just rides roughshod over the what the user might actually want (as usual!). Seems Microsoft *ALWAYS* knows best... though we all know it doesn't!!

Finally, the Windows 7 to WP8 (so-called) "sync" tool is a total and utter disgrace.... I cannot sync or copy more than 2 or 3 albums or videos without it falling over or telling me it can't transfer a file (only to then find it on my phone!!).
It is woefully underdone (even for a beta) and it should NOT have been released! (I believe this is probably M$'s way of making everyone upgrade from Win 7 to Win 8.)

Anyway, enough ranting - try having both files that I mentioned above in each album folder that you copy to the phone - it works for me so hopefully it works for everyone.

Mike
 
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V J

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Same problem here. Also the artist background won't download either. All my musics are tagged correctly so it's not the metadata. Hope this will get fixed soon. The artist picture on the live tile are so cool.

I posted this on another thread for artist backgrounds.

These artist images on the live tile are actually the same background images you will see on your lock screen and music/videos hub while playing songs. The only surefire way I've found of getting the artist images to show up is follow these steps for artists with missing background images:

- go to music/video hub
- click music and you will see the artists list
- click on an artist with missing image
- on the artist page you will see "in collection" which shows the albums you have for that artist and right -below- it you will see "xbox music store" and a [round downwards arrow icon]
- click on that icon and a list of available xbox store content from that artist will appear
- click on any item on the store content list, any album at all from that artist
- a 30 second clip will buffer, wait for it to buffer and play, and when it does, make sure the background is of the artist image and not the default black background
- now hit back until you're on your artist list again and click on the same artist and play your own saved album to make sure the artist background image is the one for that artist (this is optional)
- if it's the same then you've successfully synced that artist's background image with xbox music and it will show on the live tile and lock screen

It's very easy, you don't have to listen to the entire 30-second song preview, just let it buffer and load the image then back out and move on to the next artist with missing image. This only works for about 98% of the artists. Sometimes you will encounter artists whose background images simply refuse to show up, mostly the more obscure, less mainstream musicians. Also, if you delete an artist from your phone (as in, remove all of their songs so you no longer have a song of that particular artist) and then add them again later, their background image may no longer be saved and you'll have to repeat the process above only for that artist. 50% of the time their image will still be there.
 

pulkit10

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Haven't tried the app above but using MediaMonkey seems to work for me with regards to bringing over the album art. The great about MediaMonkey is that you can add Album Art using the web from within the program so I'd recommend it as it is quite powerful and flexible.

Only wish Zune was back. This 'connector' feels like it was made by HP.
 

Rixon_23

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I've got a Lumia 920 and have the same problem with album art not coming always coming across. I've found that by transfering music by blue tooth, sometimes the art comes over, but not always. Even though there may be apps to help fix this, Nokia needs a fix as it is too painful to mess around with 1,000s of songs. However, MediaMonkey does the trick. Works great.
 
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homefriedspam

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I just finished messing around with this. As long as the album cover art is present, it should show up in the album list. However, if you have manually copied over .m4a (iTunes) files to your phones storage through Explorer (because the Windows Phone App for Desktop is lame), XBOX music will not download the artist image for the live tile or the background. Only when you use either MediaPlayer which will automatically convert to WMA, allow Explorer to convert when it pops up the "this file might not play" warning, or are copying over only mp3 audio does the artist artwork download.

This is super frustrating, because I use multiple computers and workstations and have more than one music player and I don't want to have to spend forever converting files or keeping multiple copies of the same one because MS is trying to pump life back into the WMA standard. I'm happy that MS has gone back to an Explorer friendly format after WP7, but for music management on Windows Phone, I must reluctantly admit that I think Zune was much better (so far, let's hope).
 

gladesmellzgood

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For the Windows Phone connector for Mac User's I finally fixed my music. I converted all my MP3's ID3 tags from version 2.4 to 2.3 and turned off all the xbox music settings. I now have all my album art, correct music genre's and song titles!
 

ward05a

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I had the exact same problem, try using Windows media player to sync, this fixed the problems for me :) It seems that there is some sort of bug with the windows phone for desktop app. Hope this helps and sorts it for you!
 

WavingReds

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Hi everyone, I also ran into the same problem as everyone else did when I first started syncing up my music to my L920.

Now I am quite OCD about my album artwork and placed them all into their own respective metatags. I do use Mediamonkey to do this. At first even Mediamonkey wasn't syncing all my album artwork even though.

I have found this answer on one of the forums I read.

1. Before you start syncing make sure on your Phone in the Music hub to DISABLE "Connect with Xbox Music" so that it doesn't over ride any of your precious work on your metatags. I haven't tested if this works on the WP8 Metro or Desktop app, I know it works in Mediamonkey
2. In Mediamonkey within the device Options > Tagging, I unchecked all the boxes. So no folder.jpg or albumart.jpg copied over as it's already within the song's metatag.
3. This is the part I use in Mediamonkey "\Music\<Album Artist>\<Album>\<Track#:2> <Title>".

This works perfectly for me, no missing album art work, no metatags being rewritten by xbox music. After I finished syncing all I did as turn on the connect with xbox music again and downloaded it's artist pictures. hope that helps =)
 

Devang Sharma

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Jan 21, 2013
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i've had the same problem. There's actually an app that can help you out called 'MPATOOL' that basically attaches the album art for each artist and album or you can do it manually on the app. It works great with a few flaws
 

MSFTisMIA

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i've had the same problem. There's actually an app that can help you out called 'MPATOOL' that basically attaches the album art for each artist and album or you can do it manually on the app. It works great with a few flaws

^ This. I think Daniel wrote up an article on this app within the last 2 weeks. I've been using it alot ever since. It is a great app to have, because some of the times I've got albums that the metadata doesn't line up for in Xbox music and others I don't like the pictures that Xbox Music provides. Much love to devs like the one behind MPATOOL (WPCentral's Jay is in that bracket too)...
 

alpha beta gaga

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when playing a track i see a smallish album art cover which is fine and 'behind' a picture relating to the artist. more often than not these background pictures are tat. anyway to have these not show at all?
 

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