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Fixing iTunes album art

KevinC

Autocross Champion
Location
The land of Wyatt Earp & Doc Holliday
Car(s)
'19 Golf R, '21 M2c
If you're an iTunes guy (or gal) and play your library from an SD card or USB stick, and are having issues with album art displaying properly, you're not alone. Apple used to use smaller artwork images that played nice with MIB2 (YMMV if you're on MIB1 or MIB2.5). You could simply copy or export your tunes to a USB stick or SD card and you were golden. Lately however, they're using giant 1400x1400 images, and those won't display. You need something smaller - 600x600 works fine, not sure if you can go any bigger than that, but no real reason to anyways, so I've settled on that size. There are various ways to fix this, but I've settled on this procedure, which also retains the original image (after compression), rather than scouring the web for something smaller, which may or may not be a decent-quality replacement. To scale down your artwork to a compatible size, do the following. Note that this is all done on a Mac, iTunes under Windows may have slight differences, but the steps should be fundamentally the same:

1. Open iTunes, go to the offending album.
2. Right-click on 1st offending track
3. Select "Song Info" from pulldown
4. Go to 2nd tab, "Artwork"
5. Drag artwork to your desktop. On a Mac it will display the resolution below the filename. Chances are it's 1400x1400 if recently downloaded from iTunes.
6. Open your favorite browser and goto resizeimage.net
7. Follow instructions, uploading your artwork file, then below in the options, resize it to 600x600
8. Download or display the modified image. Save to desktop or your downloads folder.
9. Starting with that first track, choose "Add Artwork" tab from the bottom of the Artwork window.
10. Select new file. It will overrwrite the big file with the new one.
11. Step through each track, repeating steps 9 & 10.

Boom, you're done. Now export or copy those files to your USB stick or SD card, and your artwork will now display properly.

Somebody please give this a shot on MIB1 & MIB2.5 and confirm whether it fixes the issue on those as well. Or perhaps MIB2.5 handles larger files without issue? I dunno. If it does *not* fix the problem on MIB1, I suggest trying a slightly smaller image - maybe 400x400 - and see if that does the trick. But 600x600 definitely works on 2016 MIB2, and probably 2017 units as well.
 

Luckyarmpit

Ready to race!
Location
NC
I'm an Android guy but this helped me immensely... I put my library on an SD Card and couldn't figure out for the life of me why some album art was showing up and some were not. I'm super anal-retentive over my album art so now begins the long tedious task of checking/updating my entire 20+ GB music library. Thank you!!
 

Luckyarmpit

Ready to race!
Location
NC
That all sounds awful.

Download Tag&Rename, it's free for 30 days.

Resize the entire album in there in seconds. Done.

I did download it but I can't figure out how to resize the album art in bulk. The help is... well... no help. If you wouldn't mind guiding me through it, that would most awesome and very appreciated. Thanks!
 

Diggs24

Autocross Champion
Location
de plains! de plains!
Car(s)
2015 GTI
1.Pick an album on left.
2. Right side will show all songs.
3. Highlight all songs.
4. Go up to Options at top.
5. Should be 2 items in there for resize "Resize Files Cover Art" and "Resize Folders Cover Art". Change both to size you want.
6. For my 2015 it is max 200x200. Not sure what max is for your car, probably 500x500. Take note of what ones don't show and what ones do and you can see in tag&rename what size the art is to figure out max size.
 

Luckyarmpit

Ready to race!
Location
NC
1.Pick an album on left.
2. Right side will show all songs.
3. Highlight all songs.
4. Go up to Options at top.
5. Should be 2 items in there for resize "Resize Files Cover Art" and "Resize Folders Cover Art". Change both to size you want.
6. For my 2015 it is max 200x200. Not sure what max is for your car, probably 500x500. Take note of what ones don't show and what ones do and you can see in tag&rename what size the art is to figure out max size.

Got it!! It was totally in front of my face and I missed that option. Yup, mine is 500 x 500. Doing it now. Thank you!! *bows*
 
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