MP3 Thumbnail artwork

Hi,
When I look at my MP3 files on a hard drive, the tracks show with the embedded artwork as thumbnails. This has always been the case with my MP3 files but not with my FLAC files.
For some reason, this stopped tonight and the thumbnails don't show up. What was previously thumbnail artwork is now the Quicktime Symbol. However, when the track is played on my Sonos or viewed in iTunes, the artwork is there.
Why has the thumbnail artwork stopped working with the MP3 tracks?

iWeb doesn't know about artwork in a MP3 file.

Similar Messages

Why is iTunes not showing mt MP3 album artwork?

I noticed after the latest iTunes update that most of the artwork I manually added in the last year to songs has gone missing. About a year ago I began adding new songs using the MP3 encoder. Previous songs were all loaded as AAC files. The AAC files all are fine. The artwork image still shows on the MP3 file icon in windows explorer so I assume it is still embedded in the file.
Deleting and re-adding the file back into iTunes doesn't help.
The Comments info box for the problem files also now includes a weird string of code that wasn't there before.
00000000 00000210 00000ACC 000000000075C224 00000000 00355D39 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
Finally, I noticed the iTunes folder now has an Album Artwork folder in it and It contains two folders Local and Download in it. I don't remember these from prior versions of iTunes. I could be wrong?
My guess is iTunes changed the way it keeps track of artwork in files and re-organized itself from older versions, but had a problem with MP3 files. It then put a notation in comments and stopped showing the embedded artwork.
Does anyone know what's going on here.

I've always assumed those silly strings were recording the results of the gapless playback analysis but whatever they're for it would be better if they were stored in a spare field.
Windows Media Player/Windows Explorer may be less fussy on embedded artwork formats than iTunes or the media file might actually be missing the art but the Windows Explorer cache (Thumbs.db) still shows it. You say removing-reimporting doesn't help but I assume you can still paste new artwork in and have it remembered. If so you might want to use the following tool to at least take some of the effort out of searching out which tracks you need to repair.
*How to find tracks without artwork*
To find all the tracks without artwork so that you can update them you can try http://www.stum.de/itunes-find-tracks-without-artwork/ for Windows or http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts13.php for Macs. Use Google, Amazon, Discogs etc. to locate relevant jpeg images. Ideally these should be square, 320x320 pixels or above and borderless to give the best results in the various menus. If you have artwork for some tracks of an album, but not others, select a track with artwork, right-click (Option-Click for Macs) on the art & click copy, then select all the tracks of the album, use CTRL-I or Command-I to *Get Info* and then paste the image into the artwork box.
I say 320x320 because I believe (from using TouchCopy) that it's the size used in the iPod cache so if you're going to crop or resize you might as well work to that size. Otherwise 200x200 is probably good enough.
tt2

ITunes on Windows 7 ceased expanding miniplayer after Ctrl click on thumbnail artwork.

During playback, iTunes used to expand the miniplayer album art, to full screen size, when holding the Ctrl key and clicking on the thumbnail at the top of the screen. Now the same Ctrl + click has no effect. However, after doing it, I get a double icon in the task bar, one for the complete iTunes and another for the full size mini player, except that the full size mini player cannot be found anywhere, only that icon in the task bar. And sure enough, I can click on the x at the corner of this "ghost" icon, and the icon will close, but the explandable album art never shows up. The whole thing is as if iTunes still thinks that it's working just fine, but it's not. This looks like a corrupted registry key would cause it. I tried uninstalling iTunes, rebooting the computer, and reinstalling, but this didn't help. Is this a known issue? Any ideas how to fix it? Thanks for any support.

Same problem here! Driving me nuts that it is somehow "running" as shown in the task bar, but it is not accessible in any way.

LG Cosmos 2 - MP3 player artwork question

Does anyone know of a way to mass-export album artwork from iTunes into each album's respective directory? I figured out that when "the album's title.jpg" is placed in its corresponding directory, it will show up in the phone as the cover art, but I don't want to have to download and save each and every album cover.

If you have the time, could you share your impressions of the job it did ? I hadn't heard of it; when I spent a few minutes looking it up, I saw that it's an add-on to iTunes ? I didn't realize that iTunes supported add-ons -- does iTunes make it easy to install an add-on ?
A free tool that I used for album artwork was MediaMonkey, however I used it to download one album cover at a time so I can't speak about whether it supports embedding album artwork for a batch of albums. MediaMonkey has an arrangement with amazon -- so what I thought was neat is that after MediaMonkey detected the album from the music tags, it then showed me album artwork from the various international amazon.com sites for that particular album.

Mp3 icon does not display artwork

Good afternoon,
Hopefully someone can help regarding a mp3 icon artwork issue (albiet minor). I will user Tagr to change the tagging info as well as add artwork, and normally, when it's saved, the icon will change from the default black-with-notes to the artwork. Within the last 2–3 days, it's stopped displaying the artwork, even in Quicklook and Coverflow. When the album is dropped into iTunes, it does appear. This has happened on both my home and work computers (both MacPro desktops running Snow Leopard, with all updates).
Any ideas? Would the recent OSX 10.6.8/iTunes 10.4 update have something to do with it?
Thanks for any help or insight in advance.
James

MBP Battery Troubleshooting:
To check for a bad battery, go to Apple/About This Mac/More Info
In the System Profiler window, select the Power entry & look for Health Information.
If next to Condition it says "Check Battery" then your battery is probably on the fritz.
FAQ: Apple notebook batteries – maintenance and troubleshooting

Thumbnail play indicator on mp3 disappeared

I haven't used bridge too much so excuse me if this is a dumb question, but I can't figure it out. I have PS CS5 and in full Bridge I was looking at a bunch of mp3 files and trying out different settings like marking them for review, etc. When I clicked on any mp3 thumbnail it would automatically start playing with a play indicator below the thumb's rating and name. They were all working. I then selected one thumb mp3 and gave it a rating of 4 and the thumb changed and has no indication of the play indicator and no longer automatically plays when I select it. The other thumbs still play and I can change their ratings and they still play and show the indicator. This one file though now only plays if I right click and selct open which opens a pop up window. It still shows the star ratings and name but not the play indicator. I tried purging the cache, it isn't locked and I can see nothing else that would cause it to suddenly not play automatically.
What am I doing wrong? Thanks,

I'm not talking about embeded file EXIF or IPCT data. I was concerned about the Bridge data added... ratings, notes, catagories, etc., and where they are all kept? I would want that backed up so that if the data base becomes corrupted I don't lose all the work and time I have spent on it, along with a way to easily resore it. Normally, there is no way to even see the path you mentioned. When I uncheck the hide protected opperating system files I can see the folder for user\app data but I can't even open it, even as administrator. Maybe something to do with Windows 7? Anyway, I would have thought there would be a built in data back up like ACDSee has in it's browsers.
I am leary of doing a reset as I am afraid I will lose all the set up preferences I have and I have no idea what else it might reset. I did look on line at Adobe but haven't found any clear information about this. I have suffered data loss years ago with early versions of ACDSee before they improved their back up and restore features of their data base and it is a huge loss when you no longer have all the key words, catagories, ratings, etc. that you have spent endless hours on. They now have the option of using "side car" data files that move with the files, I think this is an excellent idea.
Thanks,

ITunes cannot read ID3 tags written by Perl module MP3::Tag?

Greetings,
Just trying to re-arrange ID3 information in a large set of MP3 files. Before I run the following Perl script, iTunes can read the ID3 tagging information. After writing ID3 inform ation to the MP3, iTunes no longer reads any tagging information from the MP3.
Does anyone have any information regarding this? There is some cryptic information in the MP3::Tag POD regarding setting the "id3v23_unsync" option but that doesn't seem to alter the impact on iTunes at all. Windows and other tag readers seem to be able to read the all ID 3v1 and ID3v2 tags just fine (including the altered fields) after running the following script.
Thanks for any suggestions/guidance anyone can provide.
Description: the following program takes an MP3 filename as input.
Action: It appends the value in the Album field to front of the TITLE Field. That's it! Easy!
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use MP3::Tag;
MP3::Tag-> config(id3v23_unsync=>FALSE);
my $filename = $ARGV[0];
$mp3 = MP3::Tag-> new($filename);
@info=$mp3-> autoinfo;
@albnum = split(/_/, $info[3]);
$frame = $mp3-> {ID3v2}->get_frame("TIT2");
print $frame;
$mp3-> {ID3v1}->title("$albnum[0] $info[0]");
$mp3-> {ID3v2}->change_frame("TIT2","$albnum[0] $info[0]");
$mp3-> {ID3v1}->write_tag();
$mp3-> {ID3v2}->write_tag();
@info=$mp3-> autoinfo;
print $info[0]; //print ID3v1 TITLE field
$frame = $mp3-> {ID3v2}->get_frame("TIT2");
print $frame; //print ID3v2 Title2 field
$mp3-> close();
Thanks!
GL
Windows XP

SOLVED
Changing the config entry (Line 3 in original listing) to:
MP3::Tag->config("id3v23_unsync",0);
fixed the problem with iTunes.
NOTE: This means that iTunes version 7.x still has the synchronization problem alluded to in the documentation (POD) for this Perl module. I just had the syntax wrong to set the workaround parameter.
That aside, iTunes 7.2 works quite nicely with the modified MP3. Artwork (even though this was a modified and obscure (and legal) Bible audio, it found additional information about the MP3 in the online database).
Kind Regards,
GL
Windows XP

Can You Change The Video Thumbnail In iTunes?

I have a few home made videos that are loaded on my itunes Movies.
I would like to change the thumbnail view that iTunes displays.
I know how to add thumbnail artwork by right clicking on the video file
and selecting get info, but that is not what I want to do. When there is
no image in the artwork section iTunes displays a frame from your video
clip as the artwork, this is what I would like to change.
Is it possible on iTunes to select a different frame?

OzziesMAC wrote:
Is it possible on iTunes to select a different frame?
Yes it is. See this: iTunes: How to set the poster frame of movies, http://support.apple.com/kb/TA23881

ITunes Genre Thumbnails????

Hi,
I've created a few custom thumbnails for my iTunes Genre view.
In the Movie section, I have a two genres - Music and Musicals - each with separate Genre Thumbnails
But iTunes will not let me use both thumbnails.
It keeps "reading" Musicals as just Music, and just uses the Music thumbnail.
Any ideas how to correct this?
Cheers

Hi,
I figured out how to get iTunes to distinguish between similar genre names.
I added " <key>exactStringMatch</key><true/> " to each Music related genre in Video in the genre plist.
This allows iTunes to uses all three different Thumbnail artworks for Music in TV, Music in Movies and Musicals in Movies.
However, it does not help with allowing iTunes to use two different thumbnails for IRISH HISTORY and IRISH MUSIC.
Any ideas?

Problem with showing mp3 album art in list view.

Hello.
I have litle problem with showing mp3 album artwork in list view.
In SNOW LEOPARD all work fine, and all mp3 files have album art's preview in list mode in finder.
But in LION i have only default preview mp3 icon.
Option "Show icon preview" is already on!

I have the fix!!!!
I have had the same issue ever since Lion. Its been very painful not having album art preview in finder or the play button when rollover the file for so many versions of OSX. Today I worked hard in trying to solve the problem since Applecare support hasn't helped much, all they did was tell me to bring the computer in. The other main reason I got so motivated to try and fix this is because the DJ app for Mac only reads album art from the finder even if iTunes can display the album art. The other reason that got me curious is that my friends macbook pro album art worked fine, so I cross checked with his computer until I figured out a few things that helped and ultimately fixed the issue. FINALLY!
My set up:
- I have my full iTunes library folder on my external as I have over 700GB of music.
- It includes all my database files in there, which is very important as I have many playlist settings from over 7 years of iTunes activity.
SOLUTION:
1. With every new computer I have purchased, I use to just pressed option on Mac and press iTunes to locate my folder (which I have said is located on my external drive).
2. I tried today to press option again BUT locate and selected the default library in the user/music folder of my internal drive (standard setting from Apple).
3. Miraculously, all the album art appeared in both my external drive library and also today's downloaded songs on my Macbook pro. Ofcourse with the new default location I don't have any songs or data.
4. So I tried to find a way to keep this library data on my internal drive since it can help the finder display all my files properly, yes even have the play on rollover button but as well link it back to my external drive with all my 700GB songs.
5. I then went into iTunes Preferences/Advance tab and in iTunes Media folder locationredirected the location to my external drive iTunes/ iTunes Media folder. If it asks to collate data, press NO.
6. Then I quit iTunes.
7. Next I copied the 4 files to my desktop from my external drive as I want to keep the data I have made with all my playlists etc. The four files are iTunes Library Extras.itdb ,iTunes Library Genius.itdb , iTunes Library.itl , iTunes Library.xml
8. I then went to my internal drive User/Music/Itunes/ and dragged these 4 files I copied from my external drive into here and making sure to REPLACE the four existing files already there.
9. Next open iTunes and you will find all your presettings appear with all your music linked to your external. What this does is keep the important library files on your internal drive (that somehow makes your finder files album art appear), BUT to read also all the music mp3 files located in the external drive (action from step 5)
Presto!! All your music files whether on internal drive or external all the album art has appeared.
Hope this helps!! Let me know if there are any other questions.
I am on 10.8.1 running retina macbook pro.

FIX FOUND for iPod classic refusing to play mp3s

I have several albums on my iPod that I've ripped myself from my CDs (using EAC+Lame to rip, foobar2k to calculate replay gain and mp3tag to clean up tags and convert RPG to iTunes soundcheck). These files play fine on iTunes and any other program, and played fine on my 5.5G iPod. But they wouldn't play on my new iPod classic. Resetting or restoring the iPod had no effect.
After examining the files with a hex editor, I found that these files actually had TWO ID3v2 tags, one after the other at the start of the file. I used the hex editor to strip out the second superfluous ID3 tag and a load of null padding after it, making sure that I deleted an even number of bytes so that the word alignment wasn't affected.
The files now play fine.
It seems that the previous iPod firmware was robust enough to ignore the extra ID3v2 tag, but the current version gets confused. The root cause, though, clearly lies with the tagging programs I used rather than Apple, and with a poor definition of the ID3 standard in general.
I've been looking around for an automated solution that will scan my entire library for erroneous tags. I'm currently testing ID3Cleanup from http://www.musicip.com/freetools.jsp, which seems as if it removes the superfluous tag and padding correctly.

Do this on a COPY of your mp3 files to test first.
If your MP3 has artwork embedded in it, the artwork will be stripped out.
Go to http://www.musicip.com/freetools.jsp
and download ID3Cleanup (available in Windows, Unix and Mac versions) into the folder with your files.
Open a command shell (terminal) and change directory to the folder with your test files then type in
ID3Cleanup -compact .
(note the dot at the end)
Sync the files to your iPod and see if they play. If not, then you may have a different problem.

Adding non-embedded album artwork

Whenever I have iTunes automatically download album covers it downloads one copy to the PC and associates all relevant mp3 files to that artwork image file.
This is great but only works for like 75% of my music.
When I try to add missing artwork to my other mp3 files, it doesn't add them to the iTunes library downloads, but rather it seems to embed the artwork in the actual file. I do not want this...I'd rather have smaller mp3s without artwork embedded in the actual file.
How can I add artwork through iTunes to display with the mp3s without embedding them, just like the iTunes auto-add feature does?

That's a shame if you really can't.
I would have thought that there would be some way to add artwork locally to iTunes rather than embed the graphics in the actual mp3 file.
I had tried looking into where the info was stored that tells iTunes where the images are, but that didn't work.
Each artwork file is in the iTunes library folder, but they have some alpha-numeric labeling system. I thought the "iTunes Music Library.xml" would hold the info...but if it does it's not straightforward even though you can open the file in notepad and read it easily. All other mp3 info is pretty straightforward in the file...just not the artwork. But even if I could figure out a way to tell iTunes where the artwork is, there's still the problem of format. iTunes downloaded artwork aren't simple jpegs. They have a "*.itc" extension (for iTunes cover?), and normal image viewers failed to open them.

Any way to change default point where iTunes creates thumbnail for videos?

Is there any way to change the default point in time where iTunes creates its own auto-generated thumbnail previews for videos when you drag them into your Library and view them all using the "Movies" section in the left panel?
So when you look at them all using Cover Flow view, for example.
I know you change the thumbnail for each video after the fact, or even batch-add thumbnail artwork for several videos at once, but that's not what I'm after...
I have a WHOLE LOAD of videos that are non-sensically named (Y1_D1-4, etc.), and I want to import them all into iTunes.
Of course I will also need to change the NAMES of these movies as well.
They are actually TV shows, which illustrates the following point:
What all these "movies" have in common is that their intro sequences are all EXACTLY the same length, before they then show the title of the particular show.
Now, if I could get iTunes to use this point in time as it's setting for creating default thumbnails, that would help me in two ways:
Firstly, it would create the thumbnail that I want, and secondly, it would also show me the title of the show, so I could easily re-name the file there and then, without having to scrub back and forth, to find the name of the show.
Any clues anyone...?

Eric Willhelm wrote:
I'm wondering, is there any way to change this so I don't have to click three times to get to that last point, where the cursor is placed in the filename and ready to edit?
I don't have a direct answer to your question, but you can speed up what you're doing by pressing the "return" key after the first click instead of pausing, then clicking a second time.

Itunes cannot read id3 tags

Ok, so my itunes library file got corrupt and i lost over 5000 songs. So, i transferred all of them from my ipod to my computer and i got all of them. But 1% of the tags didnt get decoded. So i did the convert id tag thing but it didnt work. Is there a way to get it back to its normal file name or will it be called something like "PCQU" forever?

SOLVED
Changing the config entry (Line 3 in original listing) to:
MP3::Tag->config("id3v23_unsync",0);
fixed the problem with iTunes.
NOTE: This means that iTunes version 7.x still has the synchronization problem alluded to in the documentation (POD) for this Perl module. I just had the syntax wrong to set the workaround parameter.
That aside, iTunes 7.2 works quite nicely with the modified MP3. Artwork (even though this was a modified and obscure (and legal) Bible audio, it found additional information about the MP3 in the online database).
Kind Regards,
GL
Windows XP

Apple's Videos App on iPad won't load my shared library

Hi,
I've been looking for an answer to this problem for ages!
Symptoms/context:
You have all your movies onto one big drive
You have uncheck Preferences|Advanced|"Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library"
(this way all titles will be linked to your big drive, not copied)
You have drag/drop those movies from your big drive in Finder into your iTunes Movies library
You have enabled Home Sharing (File|Home Sharing|Turn On Home Sharing)
You have disabled the old way of sharing (Preferences|Sharing tab|Uncheck "Share my library on my local network")
You have proudly added a very nice artwork for each of your movie so that you'll get nice thumbnails in iTunes
by using Identify.app
or by looking on the web for the best artwork (i.e. flickfacts.com), saving it locally, then drag/drop on your movie in iTunes (Get Info|Artwork)
You're using Apple's Videos app to load your shared library on you iPad
(Start Videos app,select your Shared library,wait a while,then all your thumbnails are displayed fine)
Then as the days go by, you realize that loading your library is taking more and more time, up until that day when all **** brakes loose and you get stuck at the small round clock progress bar, and you wait and wait but no thumbnails is coming up anymore. You reset everything to no avail. What happened?!!
Well here's what I had to do to fix that problem:
Everything is about movie thumbnails!
In my case I had an overhead of 0.5GB of thumbnails for 650 movies! That's an overhead alright! By overhead I mean that the sum of all my thumbnails was 500MB, so the Videos app had to load this (maybe not entirely at once but...) every time you start the app and select your shared library. This explain why the app get slower and slower has you add new movies, thus new thumbnails/artworks.
But this doesn't really explain why ultimately the Videos app stops loading all of a sudden!
I realize the iTunes doesn't like:
Movie that doesn't show the correct icon preview in Finder
Invalid movie formats - I'll explain later
Big thumbnails
Read all 3 steps and don't forget the last paragraph at the end.
Movies that doesn't show the correct icon preview in Finder
Ultimately, I think that was the main problem of all my 3 steps
In Finder, enable the Icon Preview:
View|Show View Options|Check "Show Icon Preview"
You should now be able to see you thumbnails like this in Finder:
VALID:
INVALID:
But if you see any of these icons, the Videos app on the iPad might stumble a bit when loading the library
or
If that's the case for some of your movies, you'll have to make sure that ALL your movies have a proper thumbnail.This can be achieve:
by using Identify.app - see (note1)
or by looking on the web for the best artwork (i.e. flickfacts.com), saving it locally, then drag/drop on your movie in iTunes (Get Info|Artwork)
Once the thumbnail is corrected, it should display fine in Finder and iTunes
Invalid movie formats
There might be some cases where even after correcting the thumbnail in step 1., this icon still remains invalid.
If that's the case, you'll need to:
Either delete the movie altogether and rip it again
or reconvert it. For example with iSkySoft iMedia Converter Deluxe has a "Speed conversion" option that allows you to reconvert a 2.5GB movie in about 5 min. After the re-conversion I just had to do step 1. and all was fine, and the thumbnail would show well in Finder/iTunes.
Big thumbnails - may be optional
To speed up the loading of the movie library you have to reduce the size of the artwork that you insert into each of your movie's metadata:
Get the artwork on the web (i.e. flickfacts.com) and preferably a .jpg format,and save it locally
Open your movie file with Preview (Apple's preview app)
Tools | Adjust Size
Fit into: 640x480 pixels + OK
Save As (press Option before Saving) and save it in another folder (I called my folder "Reduced to 640x480")
Note: if you want to do this on a bunch of files at once: select all your files in Finder, right click and select Open. All you .jpgs will be opened in Preview. Then Ctrl-A to select all in Preview, then you can resize them all)
You'll noticed that a 1.5MB artwork can easily reduced as small as 50K-200K.
For example, I went from 500MB to 72MB for all my artworks. Much smallest overhead wouldn't you say?!
Now comes the part you'll all love : you need to remove ALL your old big artworks for ALL your iTunes movies:
in iTunes | Movies
Right click on a movie|Get Info|Artwork tab|Select the artwork|Delete
Drag/drop your newly reduced .jpg to that same window
Click OK to save.
You can't do that in batch, you have to do each manually like this (if anyone has a better idea, I'm all ears)
See (note1)
(note1) Important: If you use a program like Identify.app to retrieve the metadata/artwork, I'm pretty sure the size of the automatically retrieved artwork is quite big by default (around 1.5MB-2MB) so you might wanna be careful here and use it to retrieve the movie's metadata, but after that do step 3. to replace the artwork with a smaller one.
VERY IMPORTANT
Once step 1, 2 are completed (and I had already completed the optional step 3) you have to remove all movies from iTunes (see note, next sentence ) and drag/drop them all back from your drive to your iTunes Movies window. BEFORE REMOVING ALL MOVIES FROM iTUNES, make sure that the option (Preferences|Advanced|"Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library") was uncheck. If it was checked, I'm pretty sure it will delete all your movies on disk, not only in iTunes!!! - you'll have to investigate this yourselves or make sure you have a good backup copy of your movies first.
Since I've done all this, my iPad's Videos app is taking about 10-20 sec to load my over than 600 movies library
Pfew!!
Have fun gang,
Jean

This worked for me... A little time consuming but once you get rolling it goes GREAT... Thanks....
I got my artwork and saved it to my Desktop
Opened up Microsoft Paint and clicked on "File" and "Open" and found it to get it on the screen to resize it
Clicked "resize" and a box for changing it opened up
Checked the box "Pixels" and "Unchecked maintain aspect ratio"
Set Horizontal for 640 and Vertical for 480
Clicked on "OK" and went back to "File" and did a "Save As" and chose JPEG Picture
It came up "File Already Existed" and clicked "OK" (really did not care about the original artwork I found because wrong size)
Went to iTunes and on the movie right clicked on "Get Info", clicked on "Details", then "Artwork"
Go to the little box on the top left that shows your old artwork and click on it to get the little blue border to appear around it and hit "Delete" to make it gone
Click on "Add Artwork" and find it where you put the one from above on your Desktop and hit "Open" and OK and your new artwork is now there and all good.
Sounds like a lot of steps to follow but after around 5 or so you will fly through it. This worked perfect on my iPhone 6 Plus and I have artwork on my Home Videos now.

MP3 Thumbnail artwork

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