[georgelai57]

I have so much music I don’t mind if my DAPs don’t show all album covers. I am a whole album listener anyway so if it shows, it shows. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I choose an album, press play, and switch off the screen.

Yes, it’s nice to be able to see an album cover, but to me, it is way down on my list of priorities of DAP features. In addition, any album covers shown are only for less than 20 seconds and on screens that cannot compete size and resolution wise with my smartphone.

This is not to minimise the importance to some users. I can understand that. I’m just putting out an alternative opinion worth 2 cents.

 

[fish1050]

Edit: Or just use TagScanner which will both recompress and resize your album art.

I found a solution!

I used mp3tag v2.85 and IrfanView v4.50 to batch convert all my embedded album art into "baseline" compression jpegs, whether they initially were or not. Photoshop has a batch image processor but it doesn't have the option to overwrite files in subfolders so it won't work here. This does take a good amount of processing time but at least you don't have to convert the images manually.

1) Perform step 2 from this link to extract the existing album art with mp3tag. This will generate an image file for each track in each album folder. You can skip step 3 because you'll be given the option to delete the existing cover when running step 4.

2) Run IrfanView to re-save all those extracted images using the instructions here. I saved them all as 600x600 jpg quality 90/100, overwriting the original files. These two steps took about 10 minutes on my 327GB 13,700-file library.

3) Perform step 4 from the original link to re-embed your audio files with the updated images. This took a while - three and a half hours for me on a 4670k and a 5400rpm desktop hard drive. If the song title has a question mark or space at the end of it, the tagging will fail, so you'll have to manually alter those afterwards.

4) Finally, do a windows search on "jpg" in your main root folder to select all the image files to delete them and clean up your folders.

This had the added benefit of making my album art consistently sized. Unfortunately now it's one extra step I'll need to do for cleaning up metafiles upon obtaining new music, just to ensure my Walkman can show cover art.

Gonna add some keywords in case anyone does a search on this. Looks like it's a pretty common complaint on the Sony tech support forum. Sony Walkman A30 A35 A40 A45 missing not showing album cover art baseline progressive jpeg.

I simply use MediaGo for all my album art. Just highlight all the tracks in the album, click the Get Album Art option. MediaGo gets the album art from Gracenote, downloads and resizes it for you. No muss, no fuss and you know the Sony DAP will have no issues with it since MediaGo is formattng it for you. Of course you can also have MediaGo get the metadata for the album and tracks as well. If you are converting just a few from progressive to baselline in Windows you can simply open each album art image in Paint, resave the file in jpeg format with the same name and it will overwrite the file and save it as a baseline .jpg file. I know the recommended size for album art for my A17 is 450 x 450 but do you know what the recommended resolution is for the A35/A45. I am hoping my A17 album art won't look grainy on the A45 screen when I get mine and need to be redone.

 

[Faintandfuzzy]

If you just have few songs that need to change the cover, just grab cover from amazon and it´s work for me at least.

But for ALAC file with cover, walkman still can´t show the cover. I have a ZX1 before and it has also the same problem with original sony app. You need to convert ALAC to FLAC or etc to let walkman show the cover.

Wow...that is a big issue as I'd have to convert everything in my library from ALAC to FLAC. I don't think the CDs I've ripped to ALAC can be converted in iTunes.

 

[foreverbelmont]

Wow...that is a big issue as I'd have to convert everything in my library from ALAC to FLAC. I don't think the CDs I've ripped to ALAC can be converted in iTunes.

I´ve tried using foobar2000 to convert my ALAC files with cover to FLAC and all files I got after that are also with cover, no additional work required.

 

[damex]

there is no problem with ALAC. please stop misleading people.
it is just baseline vs progressive covers. sony does not have support for anything but baseline.

 

[haveblue]

there is no problem with ALAC. please stop misleading people.
it is just baseline vs progressive covers. sony does not have support for anything but baseline.

Yeah this really isn't an issue when you batch convert album covers with TagScanner.

 

[damex]

Yeah this really isn't an issue when you batch convert album covers with TagScanner.

there is 100500 other utilities (specifically on cli) that could do the same. but okay, people need fancy gui.

 

[foreverbelmont]

there is no problem with ALAC. please stop misleading people.
it is just baseline vs progressive covers. sony does not have support for anything but baseline.

Sorry it´s not working for me at least for all of my ALAC files. And convert those with problem to FLAC solve all issues.

Just post here for people also have same problem later.

 

[Kingston12]

Could anyone who ordered from Accessory Jack advise how long delivery took?

I ordered a week ago and the order is still stuck at 'processiing'.

 

[goody]

Could anyone who ordered from Accessory Jack advise how long delivery took?

I ordered a week ago and the order is still stuck at 'processiing'.

mine came pretty fast with the free shipping it took about a week ..hong kong to the uk

 

[haveblue]

Could anyone who ordered from Accessory Jack advise how long delivery took?

I ordered a week ago and the order is still stuck at 'processiing'.

Mine took a full 3 weeks from HK to US, but I don't think it was "processing" for very long.

 

[eaglesgift]

there is 100500 other utilities (specifically on cli) that could do the same. but okay, people need fancy gui.

Yes, I much prefer using applications with a GUI and I used to be a software developer so it’s not because I’m unfamiliar with computers, it’s just far more convenient. Doesn’t have to be a ‘fancy’ GUI but I’ve no desire to mess around with a terminal prompt in my spare time; this isn’t the 1970s.

 

[Sunartis]

About the album art problem I had before the same problem with my Sony NW-E394. I figured out that when the album art was missing it was because it was the wrong version of the ID3-tag. For my Walkman it works only perfect with the ID3v2-tag-version 2.3. If I used ID3 version 2.4 the album art don't work! I hope Sony has fixed this on NW-A45 which I'm planning to buy when it comes to Sweden. To convert ID3-tags I use EasyTag on Linux Mint (both free) works perfect it only converts the tags not the music. Settings for tag-format: Unicode (UTF-8), ID3v2-tag(version 2.3), automatic conversion of older tag versions to that version, using CRC-32.

Don't use: ID3 version 2.4 or ID3v1 tags then your album art cover disappears. When I create album art for the tags I use JPG and 300x300 pixels using GNU Image Manipulation Program (free on Linux), but it also works with bigger images I don't think thats the issue it wont work it's the ID3-tag version that is the problem. I really hoped this is fixed so newer Walkman support ID3 version 2.4 or older ID3v1 tags can anyone confirm this else I think someone should complain to Sony so they could make an update for the new NW-A45 a new Walkman should support the existing ID3-tags for music files in my opinion.

My NW-A45 from accessoryjack arrived today. Sound quality is pretty good, it was about time to replace my old beat up Cowon J3.

So my question to those with the A35, what's the battery life in this thing when not playing any files? I couldn't find a quick-start sleep mode like the J3 had, so I assume the substitute is to just pause it and hit the power button instead of doing a full shut down, since the restart takes too long?

Also, some of my album art isn't displaying. My tag data and file naming amongst my mp3 and flac files are 100% consistent so there shouldn't be any disparity in tag info. All cover art is in jpeg format and <1MB, shown through mp3tag.

After dragging and dropping folders into my new NW-A45 through Windows Explorer, certain album would not display album art. There is no correlation in image size, both 400x400 and 1000x1000 images would fail to show up. If I delete the files and re-upload them, some albums would be fixed while others would go bad. This happens for both the files on the main device and on the SD card.

I read that adding files to the player through Media Go would help. It still does not, and the same album art would be missing on Media Go as well. Any ideas? I'm thinking the firmware for both the player and Media Go are just missing a particular tag requirement. No issue with album art with Cowon/Foobar/Plex/KMPlayer.

 

[docholliday]

About the album art problem I had before the same problem with my Sony NW-E394. I figured out that when the album art was missing it was because it was the wrong version of the ID3-tag. For my Walkman it works only perfect with the ID3v2-tag-version 2.3. If I used ID3 version 2.4 the album art don't work! I hope Sony has fixed this on NW-A45 which I'm planning to buy when it comes to Sweden. To convert ID3-tags I use EasyTag on Linux Mint (both free) works perfect it only converts the tags not the music. Settings for tag-format: Unicode (UTF-8), ID3v2-tag(version 2.3), automatic conversion of older tag versions to that version, using CRC-32.

Don't use: ID3 version 2.4 or ID3v1 tags then your album art cover disappears. When I create album art for the tags I use JPG and 300x300 pixels using GNU Image Manipulation Program (free on Linux), but it also works with bigger images I don't think thats the issue it wont work it's the ID3-tag version that is the problem. I really hoped this is fixed so newer Walkman support ID3 version 2.4 or older ID3v1 tags can anyone confirm this else I think someone should complain to Sony so they could make an update for the new NW-A45 a new Walkman should support the existing ID3-tags for music files in my opinion.

There's very few players that support ID3v2.4 correctly. It's been known to have a lot of issues and for that reason, most people tag for 2.3 to ensure compatibility across the board. For most Sony (and car audio) players, the tagging parameters require that you use ID3v2.3 (with or without ID3v1), max of 500px on the longest side, under 100K in size, and NOT progressive mode (baseline only).

CRC32 is a checksum format (and fairly obsolete due to ease of collision) - it is not a procedure to convert a tag...

 

[Sunartis]

There's very few players that support ID3v2.4 correctly. It's been known to have a lot of issues and for that reason, most people tag for 2.3 to ensure compatibility across the board. For most Sony (and car audio) players, the tagging parameters require that you use ID3v2.3 (with or without ID3v1), max of 500px on the longest side, under 100K in size, and NOT progressive mode (baseline only).

CRC32 is a checksum format (and fairly obsolete due to ease of collision) - it is not a procedure to convert a tag...

I checked my settings now in GNU Image Manipulation Program (Linux) and progressive mode was chosen by default. I unchecked that setting now so it will be baseline in the future. But still my album cover art has worked fine on my Walkman NW-E394 anyway with progressive mode I guess it might depend on that I always used smaller jpg-images around 50 kbyte in around 300x300 so maybe the progressive mode saved it as a baseline image and not different versions of the image.

But still I think this problem with the album art and different versions of ID3-tags is something that could be solved by Sony. In my computers music-player this always works fine regardless of the ID3-tag version so then it could also work fine on the Walkman NW-A45. Sony could use the same code as the audio-player on the computer for handling the ID3-tags so the album art works. Or Sony could just deleted the function for showing album art on NW-A45 or have a choice how the tag-information should be displayed. It is not important for me at all but it is very annoying when it works for some music and not other.