Get CD info but not Album Art/Cover

[walkman_junky]

why can't SonicStage grab CD info together with album art/cover like Window Media? It searches for the CD info but then have to perform search album art seperately and when it find, it displays to a seperate small window which you can't even copy the picture from that window, ok how stupid is that???

Since it is so nice to have search by album art in the NW-S600 and S700 series (and it's really nice having album cover display in playback mode too), but it is so difficult to have those information on the music libary and eventually the player, then what's the point of having all those function. Believe it or not i have to do it manually for like 40 albums.

And the stupid playlist transfer won't transfer album cover information. So i have to transfer each track with the album cover to the player and then transfer the playlist afterward.

Am i doing it wrong or the software just simply dumb??

Edited November 12, 2006 by walkman_junky

[MDX-400]

Well WMP isn't perfect at getting album art either... Lots of times you have to manually search and assign album art as well. Why I'm not sure but it happens quite a bit. Also WMP has a bad habit of occasionally putting completely incorrect album art for some tracks!

SS will look up the album art from Gracenote as a separate process but you can make it do this automatically by setting the correct thing in the options. However, IIRC, what it doesn't do is actually assign that group/album the art automatically. That is it can look it up and display it automatically but you still have to drag and drop the picture to the group. It's fairly easy to do, as all you have to do is drag and drop IIRC.

As for playlists I can't comment as I've never used them in SS (I can't with my devices anyway); as for individual tracks I'm not sure either as SS usually applies album art only for groups I thought...

[navsimpson]

Hi,

There is an option to also search for additional info/cover art when you get cd info. The problem, however, is that it works sporadically. Sometimes it works well and sometimes not at all - when it doesn't, there isn't even an error message. I find that whatever way Sonicstage gets cover art info isn't particularly effective - WMP 11 seems far superior in this (and every other) regard.

-Nav

[Jim]

I have never been able to drag album art from the popup window to the album art slot on the album properties window. I get the little red circle with a line through it.

I can drag and drop into this slot from other sources though.

Has anyone else had trouble with this?

[JustAnUnCoolCat]

As a rough rule of claw/thumb ...

If the tagging in the files is complete enough to precisely ID the content and it's album/pressing source, it usually gets the album art (where available) right, SS i mean.

Clearly, though, where the info it works from is ambigious or worse highly vague, SS is doing like any other manager soft does for locating album/track info and art.. it makes a not so clever guess.

And given that the info stored (mostly due to way too many badly submitted CD data entries, which vary from total crap to plain lazy-assed efforts) in the Gracenote CDDB is ranging from dead right to highly vague at times, i aint suprised when i get poor results and totally missed hits from the CD info lookup.

FreeDDB aint a huge amount better, but there at least, people do sometimes take time out to correct bad entries when they come across them.

As i said somewhere else, many many moons ago, if the publishers of the commercial media made a point of ensuring there was an official entry in the CDDB's of the media at release time, at least when you get bad results, it simply would mean the lookup failed due to some bad reading/guesswork at the client end.. or the return data was one of a number of bad user entries.

But if the official submission was right, it shouldn't be the case of getting bad results.

Hell, if the publishers asked me nicely, and offered a token gesture sum to help me towards my household bills, i'd happily take all their back-list and current release info and go cross-ref and correct to ensure there was at least some kinda correct official entry that could be relied on.

Oh well, that's life - people rarely consider the obvious

'Tom Kat'

[MDX-400]

I have never been able to drag album art from the popup window to the album art slot on the album properties window. I get the little red circle with a line through it.

I can drag and drop into this slot from other sources though.

Has anyone else had trouble with this?

Look at the top centre of your screen when you select an album in the library. You'll see the box with the SonicStage logo/default thingy in it beside the album name when you highlight it in the Library pane in SS.

Then drag the image to that little box up top and it will do it. It will ask you if you want to assign the cover art to every track in the album. You do not need to do this unless you transfer individual files and not whole albums (or anything under that album in SS anyway). If you assign every track the cover art it will appear even if you only upload one track in the album to the device. However, if you never do that this will only serve to increase file size by a little for no reason. If you just assign the cover art to the album alone and transfer the whole album, all tracks in that album should still show the cover art on the device.