Music Cache / Refreshing Artwork

[XideXL]

I've recently gone through the trouble of manually embedding album artwork into about 400 mp3s to store on my Incredible. I used the same method for all of these files and 99% of them successfully displayed when I transferred them. However, I somehow forgot to do 2 songs on one album, and I guess the player couldn't distinguish between the songs with and without artwork for this particular album and decided not to give any of the songs artwork (Everything is stored in a Music\Artist\Album folder structure).

My question is this: Is there a way to tell the music player to refresh the album artwork for a particular album, or is there a way to clear the cache for this sort of thing? Because it appears no matter how many times I remove and reload the songs for the entire album, delete the folders, try a new artwork image, etc. it always remembers the album and its previous association of having no artwork.

I have completely deleted the entire albumthumbs folder located in \emmc and this did successfully remove all album artwork for all of my songs and forced the media player to reload them when I started it up. However, this same album still gets no artwork associated with it each time. Is there something I'm missing somewhere else?

 

[XideXL]

Interesting side note: I found somewhat of a workaround, or so I thought. By placing this album in the root Music directory instead of within the same Music\Artist\Album folder, I was able to get the music player to pick up that these were new files and it successfully associated the artwork! I then moved the files back into the album folder where they belong and the artwork still stayed attached to the files. Hooray, victory right? Not quite.

For some reason, my one playlist which contains the songs from this album, no longer shows the songs in the playlist. However, the songs are still playable through albums, artists, or songs, and the .m3u playlist file still contains the correct path for these files. So, I thought, let me try rebooting my phone to refresh that playlist. Once I did this, not only were the songs still not playable via the playlist, but the artwork reverted back to nothing!

While I'm fairly certain reloading the artwork the same way and creating a new playlist file will work, just thought that was something interesting to point out. There definitely seems to be some sort of cache hidden somewhere, but I have yet to find it.

 

[XideXL]

Seems like I'm talking to myself here now lol, but I would just like to add I noticed that when I import a playlist via uploading an .m3u file, the player seems to take that information and create it's own version of the playlist elsewhere. As you can see in my previous post, I removed and re-added songs, but the playlist got screwed up. I then decided to remove the .m3u completely and noticed the playlist is still in tact on the device and that after the initial transfer of an .m3u, the file itself is no longer necessary.

Still trying to find out where all of this data is stored however, would be nice to know for future reference if it's even possible to access it.

 

[XideXL]

Ok, really frustrated with this now. Every time I seem to make progress, it gets spit back in my face. I successfully added the album artwork back into the songs and manually re-added those songs to my playlist and everything was just the way I wanted.

However, upon rebooting my phone, the album once again had no artwork and was no longer in the playlist. Funny thing is, the first time I added music to my phone with a smaller playlist I was unaware of needing artwork in the tags to get it to show up, so like 5/60 songs had artwork and the rest didn't, but when I redid those I've had no problems since - it's just this one F-ing album! I decided I had enough and tried everything to reset the data, here's what I did:

1. Deleted all music from the device
2. Deleted all thumbnails from the albumthumbs folder
3. Menu -> Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications -> Music -> Clear Data
4. Uninstalled doubleTwist (I noticed it had some music database files associated with it)
5. Deleted the remaining files from doubleTwist after uninstallation
6. Deleted album artwork on PC and chose a new image to embed
7. Renamed the album within the ID3 tag
8. Renamed the filename of each mp3
9. Rebooted the device
10. Re-added music to device

Now in the past when I cleared the albumthumbs folder, the music player would take a minute to reload all of the thumbnails, but pretty much everything had one without having to be loaded into the player. This time, most songs showed up as the default music note icon until I loaded them up. Seems like significant progress as I must have deleted out the cache I have been looking for, so I figured I had succeeded.

But once I got everything loaded, the SAME album had no artwork. Strangely enough, with a bit of tedious browsing through the albumthumbs folder, I noticed that this album's artwork DOES have a thumbnail stored and is the correct artwork, however it just doesn't show in the player no matter what I do! (unless I manually delete, re-add to a different folder, move back into place, and reupdate my playlist every time I boot my phone which is ridiculous)

Please help!!!

 

[XideXL]

Yay, solution found on my own! Feel kinda stupid for not finding this right away, but it seems the folder name is they key factor in causing this problem, as when I renamed the folder after clearing the thumbnails, etc. and rebooted, everything is fixed. Still very odd as I've had other files with no artwork and updated them without this problem and I'm fairly certain that piece of data linking that folder name to empty artwork, probably along with many others, is still looming on the device clogging it up

 

[Krzr93]

Ok man you lost me. I'm trying to freaking get artwork for all my music as well. I've wasted my whole night trying to get the artwork to actually show up. To make matters worse, most of the apps on the market that do this for me don't work for the Incredible. How do you embed or get the stock music player to recognize the thumbnails?

Did you use some sort of program to do all of this?

Also, mind summing up that huge explanation of how you went about doing this with just a step to step method? Thanks!

 

[XideXL]

Lol, my problem was beyond just embedding the artwork, and yeah it was weird and probably not common.

To embed the artwork, I used two different programs: one to find artwork images, and one to edit the mp3 tags and embed the artwork.

The album art finder can be downloaded from here
The mp3 tag editor can be downloaded from here

Tip: Moving all the music you plan to upload to one folder makes this an easier process.

1. Load up the album art finder. Open a new file browser and navigate to the music directory
2. Load up the mp3 tag editor and navigate to the same directory
3. Back in the album art finder, select all albums and click search
4. The search window loads the first album. To get to the next one you have to close the window and a new one pops up.
5. Pick the album art you want, right click to copy
6. Go back to the album art editor and paste the artwork for the appropriate album

Tip: The artwork finder queues the albums it searches for based on the filename, so I find it's best to sort the mp3 tag editor by filename instead of artist or album just to make things easier.

 

[Krzr93]

I am currently using a different program to embed music at the moment due to me starting before you replied lol. I'm using Mp3Tag (LOL Edit... So tired I didn't notice that I was using the same program).


What do I do after I'm done embedding all the artwork? How do you set up the files and folders on the SD card?

 

[XideXL]

Yeah, mp3tag is the same app I used

 

[Krzr93]

OK well I did a quick reboot without doing anything else and some of the albums now have the artwork but most still don't. Problem I had in mp3tag or a folder problem?

 

[XideXL]

I personally used the doubleTwist PC app simply for the fact that it automatically creates a .m3u playlist file when you drag and drop a playlist to the device through their software. This way I don't have to create my own playlists. (I first put the playlists in iTunes and then pulled them into doubleTwist from there, but not sure if that's really necessary)

 

[Krzr93]

I personally used the doubleTwist PC app simply for the fact that it automatically creates a .m3u playlist file when you drag and drop a playlist to the device through their software. This way I don't have to create my own playlists. (I first put the playlists in iTunes and then pulled them into doubleTwist from there, but not sure if that's really necessary)

Are you basically just making the playlists the albums? So for all the songs for one artist, you throw in that playlist? If the playlist isn't needed in your opinion, I would like to skip that. It's just that last part you were explaining that I'm stuck and confused on. Am I making Album folders in the albumthumbnail folder? Do I just put the music file alone inside the Music folder?

 

[XideXL]

Most artwork wont show up til you play it once in the player. When you load up a song, the artwork should appear along with the artwork for the songs above/below (left/right). If it still doesn't show, double check on a PC that the artwork actually is in the file. This is where I ran into my problem. I missed a couple songs and had to add the artwork, but once I did that and put it back on my phone, it still wasn't showing so I ended up having to change the folder name that the songs were located in to get it to show up.

As for the playlists, no. DoubeTwist actually automatically sorts the music when you upload it into an Artist/Album folder structure (based on tag info) which is another reason I used it (since I moved everything from this type of structure to a single folder to get artwork). I have multiple artists and albums on single playlists, but doubleTwist takes care of all the sorting for me.

 

[Krzr93]

Lol shoot I was troubleshooting the problem and read somewhere that you transferred yours files to the root folder. Well I'm currently doing that and now waiting 10 minutes for something useless haha. Plus it's a 10 min transfer back to the first folder I had it in.

Ok so I'm going to try to play each song to see if it kicks in the artwork that way. I will post back results probably later.. Due to it being 1:30 am here...

 

[Krzr93]

Rebooted phone and started trying to play the files. They played but most of them still don't have artwork like before. mp3tag did put artwork on some of the songs though... Just not that many.

 

[XideXL]

Within mp3tag, make sure you save each file after you copy the artwork in before switching to another song, otherwise it will clear the artwork and not remember what you just did. I think that's the reason I missed a couple songs the first time around.

 

[Krzr93]

Within mp3tag, make sure you save each file after you copy the artwork in before switching to another song, otherwise it will clear the artwork and not remember what you just did. I think that's the reason I missed a couple songs the first time around.

Wow OK I guessed I have just ran into a bigger problem now. Neither my computer or my Incredible are noticing that I have the USB plugged into each. Therefore, I can't access any files.

Also I was thinking about the whole artwork problem I'm having so I thought that maybe the artwork album name needs to match the album name exactly in order for the Incredible to notice it is there.

 

[XideXL]

Personally I only used artist and album fields in each tag and everything works fine. I left in track #'s etc, but no album artist or other fields related to album/artist

 

[Krzr93]

OK so I think I finally figured it out. I decided to start organizing my music into this:

music/artist/album (Just like you did I think)

As far as I can tell, all of the albums I have organized so far now have artwork showing up. I will update back later on the results. Still have a lot of organizing to do...

 

[XideXL]

Yep, that's how I have mine. Again, I would recommend doubleTwist as it creates those folders for you and organizes accordingly all from the tag info, saved me a whole lot of time. Only downside, for me at least since I store on the phone itself, is that you can't tell it whether you want to store on the phone or SD card, it's just whichever pops up first (most of the time it's the SD card). Either way, glad you got it working. Good luck with the rest!