charlesml3

Gang,

Spent some time today sorting out how to get Album Artwork to display properly from SD Cards or the Jukebox. Again, the manual is very weak in this area. It just says 800x800 pixels max, GIF, JPG, or PNG format. That's it.

There's more to it than that. Each MP3 file has to be tagged with the artwork in order for the system to read and display it properly.

I found a free utility called MP3TAG to make this easy. Mp3tag - Download

I found it's easier to not try to edit all of the files at once. I dragged and dropped them in batches. All the A's, then the B's, etc.

So here's the process:

- From wherever you're keeping your music, drag the entire folder over into MP3TAG and sort the list by Album to keep all those songs together.

- Select the first song in the list and see if anything pops into the album art at the bottom left of the screen. If it shows the proper artwork, then spot check a few more of the tracks in that album to make sure. If they're all good, highlight all of them and click the little "Save" button in the upper left corner and move on to the net album.

If it doesn't, then you have more work to do:

- Highlight all of the tracks for this album.

- In MP3TAG, click Tag Sources, and then Cover Art and select Amazon.com

- From there, I take the defaults almost all of the time. Amazon will almost always find the right album cover and MP3TAG will download it and attach the artwork to the mp3.

- Once it's done, click the little disk "Save" button at the upper left. This will edit all the tags on your source files to include the proper album art.

- Once it's done, you can delete these tracks out of MP3TAG and move on to the next album.

Alternatives:

- If you already have .JPG Album Art downloaded from somewhere, you can use that. Highlight all the tracks for that album and then right click on the empty album art on the bottom left.

- Select "Add Cover" and browse to wherever the .jpg is and select it.

- Click the little "Save" disk in the upper left to save the tag back out for all of the tracks in that album.

That'll get it done. I've verified that this works with tracks on SD Cards and the Jukebox.

-Charles

iaflyer

Which car and model year are you talking about? And what MMI version do you have?

GRT89521

I use Meta Z on the Mac. Works great

charlesml3

It's a 2015 S4, but the procedure I'm documenting here isn't really specific to that car. If the MMI in your car has the capability of showing album artwork, you'll have to make some changes to get it to work. That'll involve tagging each .mp3 file with the .jpg associated with the artwork.

I used mp3tag to do this, but I'm sure there are other utilities that'll work as well.

-Charles

charlesml3

Some more information:

- If everything seems right but yet the Album Artwork doesn't show in the MMI, then the most likely cause is tagged .JPG is too big. Utilities like MP3TAG will show it, but the MMI will not display it if it's bigger than 800 pixels in either dimension.

- The MMI is really picky about the Artist and Album tags. If the Artist tag is empty on a track, it'll appear in the MMI separately under "Unknown Artist" at the top of the Album list. You have to make sure ALL of your tracks have those fields filled in.

- Sometimes a Greatest Hits CD will list the Album as whatever it came from instead of "Their Greatest Hits." Cute, but the MMI will interpret each of these as separate albums and display them separately in the MMI. If you want them to appear under ONE album, you'll need to change the Album tag on each track to be the same.

charlesml3

And some more information:

The Jukebox doesn't understand Double albums so well. For example, The Wall looks like this:

Pink Floyd\The Wall\CD1
Pink Floyd\The Wall\CD2

So I went into MP3TAG and marked all the tracks on CD1 as Discnumber 1 and the ones on CD2 as Discnumber 2. This worked beautifully for iTunes. It did not work so well for the Jukebox.

After I imported them into the Jukebox, it showed:

01 - In The Flesh
01 - Hey You
02 - The Thin Ice
02 - Is there Anybody Out there
...

Not what I wanted. It appears that the Jukebox does not read and understand the "Discnumber" tag on a .mp3 file.

The trick is to know that the Jukebox only pays attention to the "Track" tag on the .mp3 file. Note that this is NOT the filename. The Jukebox does not sort by that. It simply displays whatever is in that field.

In my situation, the tracks in the CD1 folder were 1-13, and the tracks in CD2 started over again at 1 ending again in 13. That's why the Jukebox was grouping them that way.

The solution is to change the "Track" tags in CD2. So now in CD2, I have "Hey You" tagged as track 14 and continuing through to "Outside the Wall" tagged as track 26.

This might not matter so much on a "Greatest Hits" double where you really don't care which order they play in. With "The Wall" being a concept album I really wanted to preserve that play order.

-Charles

charlesml3

Further input:

Don't lead the filenames with numbers: "01 - In The Flesh.mp3"

The "01 - " part is irrelevant and the MMI will not sort by that anyway. All you're doing is burning the first 5 characters that show up on the MMI and at the top of the Driver Information System screen. Simply limit your .MP3 file names to the song name : "In The Flesh.mp3" to take maximum advantage of the screen real estate.

-Charles

Changinman

Hi, Charles. It's been 2 years since you posted this, but I just bought an Audi and am struggling with the same issues, and wondering if you or anyone else checking this thread has learned anything additional since you posted. I have a large, properly-tagged mp3 collection which I've copied to an SD card for my car. Has anyone found another workaround for the double-album issue, other than renumbering the songs on disc 2 to pick up where disc 1 left off? I have a large collection, that's a pretty cumbersome process.

I'm also frustrated that the MMI system doesn't read album-sort or artist-sort tags. So (using your example), "The Wall" is filed under T rather than W; and solo albums by David Gilmour are filed under D (rather than under G as they do in iTunes or on my iPod -- not a huge deal, but frustrating with a large collection. Curious if there are any fixes -- preferably in the car settings, not through re-tagging my music collection.

charlesml3

I have found no other way to deal with the double-album issue. You have to understand the limitations of the MMI, and adapt your collection to that. I know it sucks. I used a cute tool called Mp3Tag. It makes these bulk changes fairly painless.

In addition, I haven't found a better way to sort them either. The MMI is very primitive here.

Honestly, I usually just keep my music on my iPhone and play through that. It seems easier.

-Charles

Changinman

Thanks for responding. I figured out how to do a bulk-change to track numbering using mp3tag so that it renumbers all the songs sequentially, so that's solved.