Adding Album Art to the N95 Music Player
Published by Steve Litchfield at 11:03 BST, May 4th
Q. I have a Nokia N95 which I'm generally pretty happy with. One oddity is that, having copied over hundreds of MP3 and WMA music tracks, in named folders, from my PC onto my microSD card, none of them display the album artwork in the N95's Music player.
A. The display (or rather non-display) of album artwork is something of a magic art, there being several ways of implementing it (inside the MP3 files themselves, in separate files, etc.) Your problem is a common one and solving it will mean getting your hands dirty.
For each album/folder in your music collection, and those on your N95's memory card, there's probably a set of JPG picture files starting 'AlbumArt...', added by Windows Media Player (normally).
Using any third party file manager (e.g. the free Y-Browser, at
www.pushl.com/y_browser/), go into any albums/folders for which artwork doesn't display, select the largest artwork image and use 'File>Attributes' to set 'System' and 'Hidden' to 'No'.
Once you've done all albums, start up Gallery and verify that all the cover images now get picked up OK.
In Music Player's 'Album' list, highlight each one in turn and use 'Options>Album art'.
Use 'Options>Change' and pick the appropriate cover from the displayed gallery. You'll be asked if it's OK to change the image for all tracks in the album.
Note that on the next PC Suite 'Image store' (depending on your settings) the original cover files may get archived off onto your 'My pictures' area on your hard disk, but S60's Music Player won't mind, it will already have made its own set of cover thumbnails and these won't be affected.
Phew! Having to go through this slightly fiddly procedure is a pain (blame Nokia and Microsoft) but it will only take a few minutes and is a one-time process!
PS. it's worth noting that another way to get the album art images onto your N95 is simply to grab them from Google Images and save them to a convenient folder..... It doesn't really matter whether you grab them from the Web or from your music folders, the end results the same!
Categories: Applications, Troubleshooting, Miscellaneous
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition
Discussion
justwords
Comment: And how does it work with itunes? I think itunes puts the pictures in the mp3-file. But they are not shown on the n95.
zook450
Comment: I've been looking for instructions on how to get album art on my N95, and I was excited when I found this. However, I copied the art to the album folders, set attributes, but when I try to select album art in the music player it says (no album art). I can see the album art in Y-Browser and can open the .jpg's from there, but Music Player just doesn't seem to like them. Any ideas or suggestions?
Vatoe
Comment: The easiest way to fix this (without involving a PC) in my experience is:
a) copy the album art to same folder as the mp3 album on the phone
b) go to music player, then into the albulm you wish for the art to be displayed in.
c) Once you have the song list, hit options and scroll down to "Album art' which is the third from the bottom iun the presented menu.
d) select Albulm art. After the no albul art message select "options" => "change".
e) you should then be presented with a host of pictures from your device - just select the correct picture (album art) and select assign. Just make sure the picture is relatively small (at around 20 kilobyte mark?).
f) now the artwork will be displayed..
cheers,
V
Enizmitic
Comment: As mentioned in the article, embedding is an option.
Many applications that claim to embed the image into the MP3 file don't work with aac files on the N95 (On that point, as we are limited to 2GB, I'd recommend encoding your music files to aac or aac+, they're half the size and the quality is great if you're not an audiophile).
Use Media Coder (free) to encode the audio (fantastic for encoding h.264 for the N95 too), using the Nero AAC profile, then use Tag&Rename to organize and embed album art into your aac files. Works flawlessly with the N95 and N73.
slitchfield
Comment: Guys - you HAVE to use Gallery to scan the drive for the new images before starting Music player again and looking for Album art - you can't miss out this step, in my experience.
Steve
capitaine
Comment: I dont see any jpg files in the album folders on my PC, even though the cover art appears in Windows Media Player. So I dont know where the images are coming from... When I transfer the files to the N95 I do not see any album art...
slitchfield
Comment: Windows is lying to you. Go into 'View>Folder options' etc. Album art is usually 'hidden'.
Steve
BanziBarn
Comment: I've been having problems with my 95 in that it seems any folder I copy to my phone which has album art won't be regognised by the N95 (that is the whole folder and all the songs are invisable).
So, I tried as above to make hidden files visible with the idea I'd delete the hidden files and see if the 95 would see the folder but oddly no extra files showed up. Can album art be embedded into the actual folder?
Dogmann
Comment: Hi all,
I have actually discovered it in fact very easy to get Album Art on your N95 are is far from being hit or miss in fact to put it simply it's a doddle and requires no additional software at all. Go to this link on the Forum for this very simple and effective method IMO.
[url]http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum/showthread.php?t=61742[/url]
Hope this is of help to those that want Album Art on their N95
Marc
DanteLectro
Comment: I have a N91 8GB, and i've already been through this shit, so i can tell you that messing whit file browser and stuff is constant pain and doesnt pay, it's not permanent.
THE BEST WAY is to embed the album art in the ID3tag. It is permanent (well at least until you decide to remove it from the tag), and it is recognized by many audio players (WMP, portable players, phones, file browsers in properties option). You can embed images with programs such as Tag&Rename, MediaMonkey.
The reason why phones don't recognise album art saved by iTunes is that iPod/iTunes use their own album art saving method (so peculiar to Apple). As far as i remember you can save both album art and iPod/iPhone album art with MediaMonkey.
I really recommend against using gallery in Nseries phones at all. Not only it is slow, but it saves about 150MB of thumbnail images for 50MB of actual image files. So you upload 50MB of images to your phone, start the gallery, and you lose a total of 200MB of space. I'd rather use that 150MB for music (2-3 total albums) instead.
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