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General discussion

Album Art Lost in Translation

Jul 17, 2009 4:18AM PDT

I recently bought a Sony Mp3 Player, model NWZ-S639. I LOVE the sound quality in this thing. It's amazing. Except for one problem: I use iTunes, so therefore I use the content transfer software that came with the Mp3 player....and it works fine, except that the artwork doesn't show up! What gives??

Discussion is locked

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Count yourself lucky.
Jul 17, 2009 4:40AM PDT

Many would say you should call it lucky for the tunes to get over with iTunes.

In short, if the art is in iTunes, you need some i_._._ for iTunes to send that over.

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??
Jul 17, 2009 7:55AM PDT

I don't understand...what's i_._._?

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An
Jul 17, 2009 2:57PM PDT

iPod.

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One of the problems with iTunes...
Jul 19, 2009 3:18PM PDT

...is that it does a p-ss poor job of embedding/associating artwork with the actual song file. I have devices from Microsoft, Sony and Creative that all understand non-protected AAC files, and each device from those makers have had album art problems with various iTunes-created and edited files, particularly when those files are MP3(!). Strangely, I've also had less problems with older song files and their artwork that were ripped with earlier versions of iTunes. iTunes 7.x and especially 8.x seem to have created the most issues with broken art on other players (makes me wonder if Apple is doing this intentionally...)

I still use iTunes to rip and manage lossy music (though I've switched back to MP3 from AAC because we have a couple of car stereos that don't read AAC), but I use MediaMonkey to embed the actual album art into the music files. I also use MediaMonkey to feed my Sony and Creative Zen X-Fi instead of using the apps that came with those players...since embedding art with MM so far all artwork shows up fine. By no means is this a great workaround, but for my situation it's tolerable.