Zune Artist Picture & Smart DJ Mix

[farooknaji]

I'm in the UK which has had access to Zune Pass for a while but I still can't get the artist backgrounds to appear. Album art shows up fine. All my songs are tagged well.

I've tried the trick of previewing a song in the Zune Music Marketplace and the artist background appears on those songs, but if I play same artist from my local mp3s then again there is no background.

I'm also unable to use Smart DJ. I get this error:

Smart DJ error
We're having trouble creating this Smart DJ mix. In Settings, make sure the Connect with Zune option is turned on, and connect your phone to your PC.

Obviously I've checked that Connect with Zune is switched on, i've connected to my PC (well, my Mac using the Zune Connector).

This is really frustrating as Zune was one of the big drawing points for me to switch from Android. I used to use Fede's UberMusic app which was a clone, and the Artist backgrounds worked fine on that.

 

[patmondor]

I'm in the UK which has had access to Zune Pass for a while but I still can't get the artist backgrounds to appear. Album art shows up fine. All my songs are tagged well.

I've tried the trick of previewing a song in the Zune Music Marketplace and the artist background appears on those songs, but if I play same artist from my local mp3s then again there is no background.

I'm also unable to use Smart DJ. I get this error:

Smart DJ error
We're having trouble creating this Smart DJ mix. In Settings, make sure the Connect with Zune option is turned on, and connect your phone to your PC.

Obviously I've checked that Connect with Zune is switched on, i've connected to my PC (well, my Mac using the Zune Connector).

This is really frustrating as Zune was one of the big drawing points for me to switch from Android. I used to use Fede's UberMusic app which was a clone, and the Artist backgrounds worked fine on that.

Well that is not stellar! For the record not all of my artists have background photos. However, many of my "local" mp3 do generate the background artist. I can't speak for SmartDJ. Mine works fine on the phone. I would again sync to your Mac and let it fully sync. Sometimes it says it is complete, but if you do a manual sync it will pull down additional info. Sorry I can't be more helpful.

 

[farooknaji]

Right, im home now and I've tried another sync, and then clicking sync again to make sure. No success. Then tried removing all content and syncing again. Still no success. I'm using a HTC Titan running Mango 7740.

 

[farooknaji]

...i wonder if using the Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac is an issue?

 

[farooknaji]

I've just tried a sync on a spare HTC HD7S I have lying around and it has the same problem, so I don't think it's a problem with the Titan specifically.

Phone: HTC Titan & HTC HD7S
Carrier: O2 UK (Unlocked)
Windows Phone OS: Mango 7740 (both phones)
Sync Source: Windows Phone 7 Connector/iTunes on OS X Snow Leopard

 

[Apoc]

If you don't mind me asking, could you list an artist or two, of which you seem to not able to pull down the picture(s)?

 

[farooknaji]

If you don't mind me asking, could you list an artist or two, of which you seem to not able to pull down the picture(s)?

Sure, I started checking through the A's who are sure to be recognised and tried Adele, Alicia Keys and Amy Winehouse. If playing any of these direct from the marketplace then the artist art will show. But local files don't. The album art shows for local files and im sure my tracks are tagged well. Incidentally, since I started the free trial of music pass the Smart DJ will partially work. If I choose a local track and start smart DJ, it'll form a playlist but will only have songs from the marketplace (my understanding is that smart DJ should produce a mix of both local and marketplace tracks).

Sent from my TITAN X310e using Board Express

 

[Apoc]

Under the Settings>System>Applications>Music+Videos, do you have the option:Connect with Zune, turned on?

 

[farooknaji]

Under the Settings>System>Applications>Music+Videos, do you have the option:Connect with Zune, turned on?

yup, checked this, unselected it and reselected it.

Sent from my TITAN X310e using Board Express

 

[Apoc]

Really odd, unless it's just something wrong on that side of the pond. I've just tried playing all those artists on my phone with no problem. Are all these songs, downloaded from Zune Marketplace itself? Shouldn't matter, but I do notice sometimes when I put tracks on that are not from Marketplace itself, may or may not show up the artists pictures

 

[farooknaji]

Nah, they're not marketplace tracks. Though that shouldn't really be a limitation. I'd try reseting my phone but instead I've given it a go on a fresh HD7 with the same prob.

Sent from my TITAN X310e using Board Express

 

[toastyghost]

I'm having exactly the same problem, but with a Lumia 800 - also using the Mac WP7 connector software, I have a Windows install on Boot Camp with Zune present, and have tried hooking my phone up to that, enabling the 'automatically retrieve metadata' option and syncing an additional file to my phone from Windows but that didn't seem to jog it into life for the other files, nor that particular one.

I'm not exactly keen to wipe my music off the device and resync it using Zune but will probably end up doing that to see if it fixes it. If it does, and it indicates the device somehow relies upon the Windows Zune software to facilitate this feature, it will be really disappointing - after all it clearly uses your phone's data connection to retrieve the images, so why would Mac users be excluded?

 

[farooknaji]

Ok, so I tried installing the Zune software on my work laptop (Windows 7), copying across a few albums and syncing that to my HTC HD7S and it still doesn't work! This is bugging the **** out of me.