Album art looks bad in Music Player

[dragonfire6]

Hi Everyone,

I am using WMP to sync pics, vids and music to the phone and noticed that the album art looks horrible (low definition). I always added my own album art to iTunes and on the iPhone it looks clear and crisp. I figure that iTunes optimizes the photo for the iPhone but i'm trying to now optimize it for the Captivate and am running into a wall.

Has anyone else experienced this and fixed the problem?

Thanks in advance!

 

[keredini]

Yeah I have noticed this as well. Album art looks pixelated. Also noticed that the same album art looks fine in Mixzing.

 

[Argastes]

I ran into this very same problem, I tag all my MP3's ID3 with a 600x600 album art image on my computer, but after transferring them to the Captivate and playing them in the Samsung Music Player, they all look terrible. I tried almost every other music player I could find on the Android Market, a few of them actually kept the high resolution album art, but none of them integrates as nicely into the phone as the default Music Player (music controls in the notification menu, pull down controls from the lock screen).

I did some digging around in the internal SD card, and found that it generates and stores all the album art separately in a folder called /albumthumbs/, each image is labeled by a number with no filename extension, but they are all badly down-converted 300x300 .jpgs which you can open on the computer. The only workaround I have found was to convert my own album art from a 600x600 to a 300x300 jpg, then save them to that folder without the file extension, overwriting the original file with the same file number. It still doesn't look as nice, and way too much work involved to fix, so I've given up for now. I've done a lot of searching, and this is the only official word from Google I've found:

Blurry, low resolution Album Art/Contact Photos because thumbnails are being used instead of the full-res source image. - Android Help

 

[Baldilocks]

I add my own album covers and usually try to find the highest quality and largest album art pic that I can find. Looks pretty good when you do it that way:

Most of the ones I have found are around 800 x 800 images.

 

[Deleted User]

I noticed this as well.
All my Mp3s has the cover art in the tag. Usually 500x500 in size using ID3v2.4. For me, the image is not only pixelated, but completely smudged, as if the images has errors. This looks absolutely awful and I wonder why such feature that I thought was standard in all devices is not working in such high end phone.
The same songs works perfectly fine in all major players in Ubuntu so why would it not in Android?

 

[Baldilocks]

It's not Android, it's the Samsung Music Player. Another reason a LOT of us are looking forward to a STOCK Froyo ROM.

 

[Intervenient]

It's not Android, it's the Samsung Music Player. Another reason a LOT of us are looking forward to a STOCK Froyo ROM.

Only problem with that is you don't get to use the amazing 5.1 channel sound. I don't think my ears can live without it.

 

[Baldilocks]

Only problem with that is you don't get to use the amazing 5.1 channel sound. I don't think my ears can live without it.

True. I don't really mind the Samsung Music Player. Looks better than stock Android and better than anything out there right now.

 

[alphadog00]

I am having problems with Album art not showing up at all - trying MP3Tag and Media Monkey, but I can't seem to find why most don't show up at all. MediaMonkey is transfering over a *.alb file, but no i just get the colored circles instead of a picture. Some albums have pics, but most don't.

Any hints? I can't seem to find what is different.

Thanks for any help.

 

[jblaze5779]

My album art shows up fine using tunesync to sync with my itunes.

 

[Deleted User]

So basically, the stock player can't show album art that is embedded into the mp3 file? How on earth did that bug get overlooked?

 

[mi04se1]

I used Media Monkey and all the artwork transfered and shows on the stock player.

 

[TDQuiksilver]

I used Media Monkey and all the artwork transfered and shows on the stock player.

The question is not if the artwork shows correct. When music is transferred to the player, the artwork is resampled to a lower resolutions size and stretched. Thus giving it a pixelated/fuzzy look.


There has got to be a way to retain the original size and resolution.

 

[landale]

This is an Android problem and affects all Android phones. I had a Vibrant but switched to a Droid X which uses the stock music player and it does this too. The only solution I have found is it use MixZing which bypasses the albumart folder and uses the art exactly as it was trasnfered. It's not fixed in Froyo either from what I have heard so this is something that probably won't get fixed until 3.0

 

[Deleted User]

My earlier post was deleted when the entire board crashed (along with a bunch of other messages that I find to time consuming to repost).
Either way, I'm going to try to use an earlier version of ID3 (using ID3v2.4 right now with Mp3Tag) to see if that changes anything. If not, i guess I have to hope that Froyo changes things.

 

[raynerlacson]

The question is not if the artwork shows correct. When music is transferred to the player, the artwork is resampled to a lower resolutions size and stretched. Thus giving it a pixelated/fuzzy look.


There has got to be a way to retain the original size and resolution.

Ah, actually I found out a way just today. I used a program called Unlocker. I actually originally downloaded it to help me delete or move files that were unable to be deleted or moved for a reason that my computer won't tell me, but it can also be used to solve this problem. When you move the music into the device, it creates two files: AlbumArtSmall.jpg, and Folder.jpg, both of which are smaller than your original album art that you loaded(you probably already know this).

So what I did was I moved the album art jpg file that I used into the folder twice and tried to rename it, one as AlbumArtSmall.jpg, and one as Folder.jpg, but it wouldn't let me because there are already hidden files that go by that name. So I used Unlocker to rename it, and it worked.

 

[LoganCaptivate]

Yes I also strongly believe the album art looks terrible and outdated for such a new phone like the captivate. The only solution I have found for fixing album art is downloading tunewiki where it already has album art or manually searching for them in cover art apps.