We are now in April 2016, and the standard android music players are still not able to display songs' album arts correctly! I mean, when the art is embedded in the song as an mp3 tag, why on earth not just simply display it? I don't know how they programmed it, but it seem definitely illogic. BTW, the art, if embedded in the song should logically be called "song art", and not "album art", right?
The only player I found capable of doing the job is "doubletwist", but it comes at the extra price of creating a bulky thumbnail library, taking approx. 20% (of total mp3 sizes') extra system memory. Now, the extra thumbnails in Android/com.android.providers.media/albumthumbs folder would not bother me, if they were set up correctly.
In order to understand this mess, I had stumbled across a nice workaround here:
http://matthewforzan.com.au/technology/fix-album-art-on-samsung-galaxy-s3/
It basically said, if the album (name) tag is not empty, the embedded art would display correctly.
Sounded simple enough, but after closer scrutiny, I found that not sufficient
.
So, EVEN with an art picture embedded in EACH mp3 file AND the album name not empty or not named "single" AND after reformatting my SD card AND clearing the thumbs cache, the problem STILL remains.
I noticed that the standard routine of "usual" mp3 players would be to display the picture of one of the songs (random one ?), also for all the other songs having the same "album" name but having different embedded pictures, if these files were contained in the same (sub)directory! In other words, different songs in the same directory where shown the same album art, even when they EACH had their OWN embedded picture - very annoying! If, like me, you have hundreds of song, well organized in folders and structured in albums, you would be frustrated while scavenging the Android ecosystem for one decent song player, only to find out they would all behave the same (except for doubletwist) regarding this album-art-display nightmare.
It looks like these systems all use the same kind of "same album name tag" as a means to retrieve a song picture, and not simply the embedded picture (!) while playing a song, which seems quite the wrong way to me!
To conclude, the final workaround I tried, an which proved to work somehow was as following:
If you want to have a song displaying its own art picture correctly, make sure the name of the "album" tag be UNIQUE within the same (sub)directory.
For instance, in a physical directory named "club_mix_2", instead of having in all the files' album tag the name "club_mix_2", I have input "club_mix_2 - I See You (Slider & Magnit Rmx) - Jutty Ranx" for the first song, "club_mix_2 - Blurred Lines (Dj Stylezz & Dj A.G Rmx) - Robin Thicke Feat. T.I. & Pharell" for the second, "club_mix_2 - Full Fx (Original Mix) - Kolombo" for the third and so on... as long as they are different, it will be OK!
I know it looks tricky at first, but there are some mp3tag editors out there which are able to rename tags automatically out of other tags (I recommend
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ here).
This explains why, if you use iTunes' automatic way of physically organizing songs, i.e., creating sub-dirs by album/artist which you copy across to your device AS IS, you would not incur this issue.
But until then (Androis fix this bug please), feel free to test my woraround which I hope will work for you as it did 4 me
