Lock Screen\Music App Album\Artist Artwork

[TotalLamer]

What I've noticed is that any album art I've manually added with WMP shows up on my phone.

 

[Dang Pham]

Here's what I got after messing with my Lumia 920. The album art seems to download at random intervals. Xbox Music will download album art if they are missing if ALL the songs matched with album on the store. I really mean ALL the song. The store should download the artwork if it recognize your album. Search for your album on the store and it should say "In Collection."

The artist artwork is a bit tricky. It seems to download those at random interval too sometime not even work. The only way to force it is to download something by the same artist from the store. The artist artwork will come with it. Try the 30 days xbox music pass. Some artist artwork download almost immediately without forcing them to. I tried all ID3.x and they all seem to be supported. What's interesting is that even if Xbox Music download the album art and recognize your album, it doesn't guarantee that the artist artwork will come. There seem to be some kind of linking between your library and Xbox music. Without artist artwork and the "in store arrow" smart DJ will not work.

 

[laforr77]

Nobody seems to have replied to me at all regarding the ability to jump to a certain point in a song. Is that not possible?

Aside from holding FF or REW, there's no way from moving to a certain point in the song. There's no cursor to drag, and clicking on the timeline doesn't do anything.

 

[Dang Pham]

I got this from support

" Ok, this is a common issue, what you need to do is sync your phone to your PC and the metadata will update a few hours after syncing. It is a bug we are having at the moment with the Xbox music, the technical team are working on it."

 

[thirdsun]

Same problem with messed up tags here as soon as I enable the option to download additional meta data from xbox music. This is quite disappointing and makes me wonder how this could have slipped by Microsoft. Now we are left with gray livetiles, backgrounds and lockscreens.

Some other important information for Mac users:

- if you would like to use Apple Lossless audio on your device you are apparently out of luck: Tough it may seem as if the device syncs ALAC files flawlessly, you will notice thta the file size on the device is much smaller. There is obviously some transcoding in the background - however I can't tell to which format but the size of 1 minute of audio seems to equal 1 MB.

- even if you correctly embedded album artwork into the files (as opposed to the iTunes way of storing it elsewhere), those covers will only get transfered to the device during a second sync and after restarting both iTunes and the connector app. That means to get your music onto the phone as it should be, you need one sync for the music itself, restart both apps and sync again, this time obviously faster, and now the artwork should appear on the device.

If your library doesn't live in the standard user folder be sure to grant access to your music folder (see file menu). So, if you get crashes or failed syncs add your folder - the app doesn't inform you about you those issues and leaves you guessing. The reason for this requirement are limitations with sandboxing for app store distributed apps.

Overall this feels quite amateurish and I'm not sure if Microsoft is interested in improving the experience on a Mac at all.

I really like the device and the OS but those issues are major to me.

 

[-Scienide-]

I think Microsoft needs to be proactive here and show some interest in fixing this as it is a bit of a downer on an otherwise great OS.

 

[LikeWaah]

This is the one of the only things that disappoints me about WP8. I'm pretty anal about my organization too, and this is driving me crazy.

Also, I've tried matching info to the info in the store (album name, artist name, track name) and some songs will show up as being "in collection", but not all songs. Any ideas on how I can go about getting this to work?

I've tried using WMP and the Windows Connector for Mac, and neither seems to work right. Anyone have any ideas? Am I missing some metadata that causes my files to not show up as being "in collection"?

 

[-Scienide-]

Also, I've tried matching info to the info in the store (album name, artist name, track name) and some songs will show up as being "in collection", but not all songs. Any ideas on how I can go about getting this to work?

Same here and same results :mellow:

 

[Pondimus]

I too, am in the same boat. The only way I'm able to see any artwork, is if I allow the phone to connect with Xbox Music, which I refuse to do, as it only populates some of the artwork, and wrecks my album organization. This is nothing we're doing wrong. This is a half-baked music player that MS needs to address in a future update.

 

[edfungus]

Are the pictures .jpg? Mp3Tag lets you embed png too and maybe that doesn't work with windows phone?

 

[-Scienide-]

So If you set your PC to show all hidden files and folders and then browse into the music folder on your Windows Phone you can see a folder called "Artist". In that folder are loads of files named after your music artists on your phone. Past and present by the looks of it. I cant find anyway of reading these files on my PC. I've tried everything from notepad to photoshop and no joy. I was hoping to be able to figure out what was in the file, reverse the process and import my own artwork. No joy though.

 

[thirdsun]

I spoke to a developer from the team responsible for the sync application and those hidden ser files are certainly important to your library data and also podcast integration/subscriptions (there might be a fix for us international users), however these files will always show up empty and with 0kb file size when browsing the device. He mentioned that one would have to adjust a few settings for the mtp connection in order to properly access those files - he didn't give any details though and I can't test it as I'm on a mac (no mtp support on OSX), but I might get back to him on that and set up a VM to test this.

Meanwhile if you have any configuration options for mtp connections (maybe third party tools?), go ahead and try. That said, your mtp connection decides if those ser files are readable or empty, not the files themselves.

 

[-Scienide-]

I'm not familiar with MTP tools to be honest but I'd love to try and crack it. Its driving me crazy. The files do indeed show up as empty with 0kb file sizes. I renamed one and it removed the artist from the "Artists" section of the player on the phone. So they are clearly connected in someway, but no idea how.

 

[Drewstwitts]

I've finally managed to get all my album art to show on my 820 on the sd card by turning off all the xbox settings before syncing in wmp as suggested in this forum. Now however my music randomly won't play displaying a windows error message for each file. I love the phone but the music system stinks!

 

[Drewstwitts]

Now all my music shows in the song collection but nothing in albums. At least they play but no art work and no album grouping. Its a shambles.

 

[ale2999]

A solution to this would be appreciated. My library was so immaculate!
Also do you know if the windows connector app to sync music from itunes to WP8 support incremental transferring? As in if I had 1 song to a playlist, will it transfer only that song?

 

[zedmartinez]

The gray screen thing comes down to the artist picture, and has nothing to do with album art. So, that's easy enough to stop worrying about, luckily. As for the artist pictures, MS has always pulled those by linking the artist to their online database and the seeing if a picture is available. If you have music pass, this is easiest to trigger for any artist by just downloading anything from them. The device will recognize the artist is the same, lump them together and the pull down any available pictures. Once an artist has a picture, you can't get rid of it, but it will show up behind the Music app menus, in the Music tile, and on the lockscreen (if enabled) while the music is playing. If you don't have a pass, or you listen to a lot of music where the label hasn't provided an artist picture, you will need to use MPATool from the marketplace to add those. i just spent a holiday with the beta and it works a charm, will attempt to autofind pictures, ca pull from your saved photos, and has a button to do its best guess for all artists in your collection if you just want it done and don't care about picking your own shots. While possible you can use the ability to fill missing meta data ad trick MS into connecting your files to the artists in its DB, as you've noticed that pretty much doesn't work reliably, and I recommend ignoring it all together in favor of either the pass/download method or the MPATool.

 

[-Scienide-]

you will need to use MPATool from the marketplace to add those. i just spent a holiday with the beta and it works a charm, will attempt to autofind pictures, ca pull from your saved photos, and has a button to do its best guess for all artists in your collection if you just want it done and don't care about picking your own shots.

Get this man a beer RIGHT NOW!!!!!!

You have just made my day. It works perfectly. Just updated all my missing artwork in about 2 minutes and it works beautifully with the live tile now. You sir, are a legend. Thank you!

 

[zedmartinez]

Heh, glad I could help.

 

[zokstar]

Slightly off topic but how the **** do you jump to a certain point in a song? I can't figure it out. It just skips track or fast forwards.

OMG I would love to know this too!! looks like it isn't possible though