Help Multiple album art's in one album?

[cowana]

I use Mediamonkey to manage my music - some of my compilation album's have a different album art for each track.

These album arts are saved to the .mp3 tags.

However, when I play the albums using the defult android player, all the songs in one album have the same art - the art from one of the random tracks in the album.

Any ideas? Is it possible to have different album arts in one album?

Thanks

Andrew

 

[SiHa]

If these have ever been anywhere near Windows Media Player, (or quite a few other media managers for that matter), you may have a 'folder.jpg' or 'albumart.jpg' in the folder with the tracks which the player could be prioritizing.

 

[cowana]

Hmm - no jpegs at all in the 'Music' folder on the sd card...

Andrew

Edit - a reboot didn't help either - I think that for a particular album title, the desire only supports one album art. I guess that makes sense...

 

[Deleted User]

MP3 files can either have a single folder.jpg file in the same location as the music, or it can be encoded into the actual MP3 file.
Check out tag&rename, or an equivalent MP3 tag editor.
I THINK that if there's a folder.jpg it'll override anything in the MP3 itself, so make sure it's deleted (after backing up of course).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3

 

[rgeling]

This exactly the problem I've too: I've different album art for each track, but my Android shows always the same picture. All album art is embedded, following ID v3.2, no picture around.
All players I've tried behave the same, but on iPhone it works flawless.

Afaik every time you add an album on the phone, the media scanner reads the first (?) track of an album, and puts image foun it in a SQL3lite database. This image is thereafter used as the image to show for this album in each and every Android media player app.

Am I right (I hope not) and there is no solution for this? Anyone came with a solution or work around for this for me very annoying problem?

 

[devestator6]

I've been trying to figure this out too. I've come up with a couple possibilities, but both have drawbacks.

In my case, I've laid out many 'Best Of' albums. Essentially my own personal favs for various artists, in the order I want. I've set each track up with its original album art in the Metadata, changed the track # to match the order I've set up, and set the file name to have the track # at the beginning (ie. 01, 02, etc).

1. The first option would be to rename the Album data to the original albums the tracks came from (or really any name, to set the albums apart), then set the Title to have your track number at the beginning. When you play, select the songs by the artist and all of the tracks will show. The reason you need to change the Title, is because, if they are different albums, it lumps all the songs together, but sorts by title instead of file name.

2. The second option is to use sub-folders. You can keep the album name the same, but then put each track or group of tracks in it's own folder for each of the original albums the tracks are coming from. When you go back and look at the Album list, you should see multiple versions of the same album, one for each sub-folder. But each track keeps the album art that it should have. Again, you'll have to rename the title to the 01, 02, 03... format, because when you select all of the one artist it will sort in alphabetical order by Title. I haven't tried this yet, but I would imagine you could just use Folder.jpg files for each sub-folder, and you would get the same results as actually having each file contain the picture in the Metadata.

I'm going to use the second option, because I can change the titles much easier than I can change the albums. It's annoying to have multiple 'Best Of' albums listed. My original plan for my setup was to simplify and keep from having a thousand albums listed, but I'm out of options for now.

Also, I have no idea how you could work around this issue if your album has multiple Artists in it. My workarounds only apply if it's one Artist per Album.

For multiple Artists in the Album, the only thing I can think of is changing all the albums to different names, or using sub-folders. That way the player will use the metadata rather than apply the first tracks art to all. Then you would probably have to set up a playlist, because I don't know of any other built in way to group those Tracks together once the Album has been changed, or they've been sent to sub-folders.

Also, I've only tested on my HTC Aria using the built in Music app.

If anyone else comes up with a better plan, I would love to hear it.

Hopefully you can apply some of this to your own cases.

 

[DMAE24]

I've had the same problem, but mine displays my friends picture (she sent me ringtones). And I haven't been able to change the names of the songs or remove her picture from the album art. It is very frustrating and I've been dealing with this for about a month now.

 

[Alchemius]

Hi. Newcomer here. I would like to thank devestator6 for his advice, and confirm that the 2nd option does indeed work. I recently purchased a Samsung Galaxy S II (I know, I am in the wrong section, but I found this thread out of coincidence) and I have been having the same issue with separate artworks for same album tracks.

However, I tried the following variation (same artist, same album, different tracks with unique artwork): Inside the folder named after the artist, instead of naming the subfolders "01", "02" etc. I named them after the tracks themselves. The music player sorts them alphabetically, but if the artist-column is selected, and then the artist, then they are sorted by track number. I suppose this should work for other android devices as well. Still, there are multiple albums of said artist with the same name, and I sort of envy the iOS for not having this problem, although I somewhat suspect that its storing method utilizes subfolders as well.

 

[Aubs]

The only way I have been able to do this is when creating an album, called say "My Favourites", add the "artist" name in to the "Album Artist" tag too. Downfall of this, is that in the Album List, you get the same album repeated, BUT, I then went and created a playlist for my album, and all albums I have on my HTC Sensation. This way, if I want to play an album, I just need to list playlists and they're grouped correctly with their own images.

mp3tag (link HERE) can do this for you. When installing, make sure you select Explorer Integration (or what ever it is called).

Quick way is to list all songs in the album (right click on the album folder, select Mp3tag), select all, Click the icon AB (with yellow arrow), choose Format Value, Set Field to : ALBUMARTIST : and Format String to : %artist% --You can create an auto action for this so two clicks and it's done. Just press Alt+5.

While you've already got them selected, Tools --> Playlist All Files - Set the name of the file to be the playlist you want (you can set a default in Tools-->Options-->Playlist-->Filename - set it to %album%.m3u --This will save you changing it each time.).

Hope this helps someone.