TooManyUserNamesToRemember

Try it, it seems to be an excellent program, no horrible crashes like the previous tageditor I was using. Instructions on how to do a batch job with it I found on this web site here http://brentevans.blogspot.com/2008/02/aut...t-to-large.html Really, it's saved me hundreds of hours of mouse clicking (actually I wouldn't have bothered if I had to do it manually, just put up with no art). WMP really is horrible. MS seems to have an fundamental problem in their approach to things. They _always_ try and take control from the user, by second-guessing what they want and then doing it without asking them. The trouble is they ALWAYS get it wrong and the user ends up continually fighting their programs, attempting to undo the stupid things the programs, unasked, have done. Another example of this 'don't worry your pretty little head about it, the computer knows better than you' mentality is the way if a folder has music files in it (or is in the MyMusic folder, not sure which) by default windows only shows music-file related info - you have to perform several mouse clicks to get it to show the 'modified' date, which is what you more often than not, need to see or sort by. Again it's windows trying to be too clever and pre-empt what you want, and getting it annoyingly wrong. And yes, WMP does seem to have its own 'memory', insisting on showing the wrong art when the correct art is in the folder, refusing to display the art it itself has just downloaded, or refusing to show all the tracks in an album, or occasionally entire albums. For some reason the only way to force it to notice the files its decided it doesn't like is to 'add' the music folder again with the file menu, then it suddenly wakes up and re-reads the directory. I also hate the way there seems to be no way to stop it automatically playing cds that you put in the drive while its running. Worse, if at the time it's in the middle of downloading info from the net then you can't even get at the 'stop; button to stop the cd playing, because the 'retrieving information' dialog box has the focus. You're stuck playing till it finishes a disk you never asked it to play. I can find no way to turn this off. I'm about to google for an alternative music manager, but I'm paranoid about spyware.

Woo hoo! Seems that program you recommended does indeed allow a 'batch job' approach so I can do exactly what I wanted, i.e. automatically take the folder art and embed it for all 3000+ albums. Thanks very much, solved my main problem. Now if only I could stop WMP overwriting correct art and tracklists with wrong ones, without even asking me first. (Seems it uses a database of music data that consists entirely of US releases, and as they are often slightly different from non-US ones it proceeds to mangle, corrupt and generally ruin all my albums in its attempts to force them to fit to their US versions. Grrr. Trouble is Sony's Media Manager is even worse.)

Thanks for that suggestion, I've grabbed that program and it looks very good, though I don't think it entirely solves my specific problem with art. Ideally I need something that goes through every folder and automatically changes the way the art is stored from the WMP method (in the folder icon, I think) to the system file in folder method that the player uses. In fact I don't understand how exactly WMP stores the art. I was using a program called 'audioshell' from www.softpointer but it kept crashing with very worrying error messages (something about 'windows has stopped this program to protect your computer' because it was trying to write to memory reserved for windows). Had to spend an age on virus and spyware scans to be sure. Anyway, it seems to me there's a serious need for standardisation about mp3 tags and art. Every program and player seems to handle them differently. Art is either embedded in the mp3 file, or it is, as you describe, in a system file in the folder, or it;s somehow embedded in the folder icon but not present inside the filder. Now I have loads (thousands) of albums each with the art embedded in a different way, and its a pain to tell beforehand which ones will show up on the player! Still, I really like this player. Sony seem to have much higher QA standards (for hardware) than Apple. and amongst the best sound quality, I think.

I Discovered that if you use the 'file details' option on Windows Media Player it only puts art into the folder icon or perhaps some hidden database of its own, it neither embeds it in the mp3s nor puts in the folder the way Sony 'media manager' does. This means I now I have art that is visible in both WMP and media manager, but no way to put it in a format that the player (NWZ A818, i.e. not an ATRAC device) can use. Worse, there's no way to tell from looking at it in WMP or MM whether the art is there in the right form or the wrong form, so I don't even know which albums need to be laboriously updated by googling, saving and then dragging and dropping the art (that I already have). As I have 3000 or so ripped cds, most with art automatically inserted by WMP I can't face fixing this manually. I hate computers. Does any one know of a utility that can take all the (thousands of pieces of) art that WMP has stored (somewhere, God knows where that is, I'm guessing its in the folder icon itself for each album) and automatically move it into the relevant album folders or embed it in the mp3 files, so that it can be used by the player? (See, the NWZ A818 will only display album art if its inside the folder, with the name 'folder', or if its embedded into the mp3 tags themselves, but WMP doesn't do that if you automatically look up the art on line, it puts it in the holding folder icon, I think). PS Using XP SP2

I tried Sony Media Manager, and it seems even worse than ChronicStage. It seems to insist on spending 30 minutes on startup 'opening media cache' whatever that means, during which time it obstructs your access to the desktop with an unmovable spash screen. Then, if when it finally runs it for some reason fails to detect your net connection there's no way of making it look again (that I can find) short of quitting and restarting, involving another 30 minute wait while it does God knows what. This issue alone makes it unusable for me. I will never understand how a company as wealthy as Sony (and with such high standards of quality control for hardware) is unable to find any competent programmers to employ. Is it that they get their hardware engineers to knock up some software in their spare time or something? Or maybe they get their engineers' pre-school children to make something as a kindergarten project? Anyway, the reason I was posting is that I've used Windows Media Player to embed art, and it shows up fine in WMP and in 'media manager' but almost none of it will show up on the player itself. The manual says in an unhelpful way, that 'some art may not display depending on the format'. All the art is in jpeg form, and maybe 2% of it displays. What 'format' does it have to be in so that the player will actually display it? Oh, figured it out now, my ignorance...so if you use the 'file details' option on WMP it only puts art into the folder icon or perhaps some hidden database of its own, it neither embeds it in the mp3s nor puts in the folder the way media manager does. So now I have art visible in both WMP and media manager, but no way to put it in a format that the player can use. Worse, there's no way to tell from looking at it in WMP or MM whether the art is there in the right form or the wrong form, so I don't even know which albums need to be laboriously updated by googling, saving and then dragging and dropping the art (that I already have). I hate computers. Does any one know of a utility that can take all the (thousands of pieces of) art that WMP has stored (somewhere, God knows where that is) and automatically move it into the relevant album folders or embed it in the mp3 files, so that it can be used by the player?

He just needs to get a _really_ long power extension lead!

I'm in the UK and mine certainly has a difference from 20 to 30. Even with a volume limiter, surely you'd hear such a difference? The limiter would squash the peaks, but the quieter bits would still get louder, no? So perhaps yours has a very odd fault? Pleased to hear that mine has no limiter. Apparently Apple has imposed the French limit on all EU IPods. 'Course, 50 years from now only the French will be able to hear anything.

Hmm, cheaper to buy 2 818s and then glue them together! Twice the battery life that way! And twice the screen size! (er, well, sort of).

I'm so glad I never bought any DRM'ed downloads (from Sony or anywhere else). Always bought cds and ripped them. Mind you, I initially ripped 1000+ cds to atrac (for a sony mindisk player), then re-ripped at least as many to mp3 (for another brand mp3 player and mp3 cd player) then went back to ripping to atrac (for sony flash player) then lost the lot in a drive problem, re-ripped them to atrac, and then got an 818 and dug out my original mp3 rips (saved to cd/dvdr fortunately) and went back to ripping mp3s again! Still have another 1000 or so cds to rip. I may have spent as much time ripping as actually listening to music. Also it sometimes really galls me to think of the thousand of pounds I've spent buying cds when most of it appears to be freely available for download for those with less sensitive consciences than me. Is Atrac now totally dead? Its a shame that Sony didn't just make it an open format, like mp3, and let others produce their own encoders, no? Or is that a hopelessly naive idea? Am I right in thinking that sound-quality-wise it was pretty good?