Tutorial: Making Album Art Work (Most LG phones)

[Steve.G]

Ok, so I have seen a lot of people complaining that their album art doesn’t display, etc., etc. I’ve never had problems with my mp3s on my phones, so I am going to set out to write a little guide on how I do it.

This guide is for you if:
You own an LG Vcast phone – this is most of them now days
You want to have your music show up right on your phone’s music player.
You want your album art to work.
You don’t mind doing things yourself... including thinking.


What I’ll be using:

Hardware:
My phone – LG Voyager
Memory Card – This is in the phone, mine is 4 Gig (more storage than all of my first 10 computers put together…)
USB Data cable – came in the box

Software:
Windows XP MCE SP3 (this is a fancy way of saying I don’t own Vista)
DON’T FORGET TO INSTALL THE DRIVERS FOR YOUR PHONE!!!! IF YOU WANT TO SYNC, YOU WILL FAIL WITHOUT DRIVERS!!!1111oneone

Windows Media Player 10
- Yes, Windows media. I don’t use iTunes, I don’t want iTunes, I don’t like iTunes.
- Yes, v10 .. there was something about v11 that made me want to downgrade at some point.. I don’t remember..
- These being said, the syncing process may still be ok with iTunes or WMP 11..I just haven't tried
- VCast music player appears to be very similar to WMP, but I never use it because it’s bloated and poorly written.

Ok.. got that stuff out of the way…

So let’s assume you have figured out how to rip music off a CD and/or you already have a library of music… or you are downloading music from your favorite torrent tracker. Anyways, you have a folder with music in it. Like this one:



This is a great CD… the Journey Ahead, by The Inspirations.

Now, my songs here are in mp3 format already. You can configure WMP to rip direct to mp3 and not use wma format. If you really like wma.. good for you, your phone will play them.. but I prefer mp3 because of the portability, compatibility, etc. If you happened to download music in wma format, but you prefer mp3.. just Google for a program to batch convert them. XP Media Center Edition (MCE) comes with a built in audio converter.. it works well. You can download a program called Switch, or any other number of methods to convert .wma to .mp3… but that’s a different tutorial.


Now, ordinarily, if you were to sync the music right to your phone.. or.. if you just drag and drop them into the my_music folder on the SD card.. you get something that looks like this:



No album art, how boring….

So here’s what you do:
Pop open Windows Media Player and find your album. Select it all, and then right click on one of the tracks. In the context menu you get two options on how to do this. First, you can click on “Find Album Info”


You can also have WMP set to find this info automatically (if available, and you are online) at the time you rip the album. Again, that's great, it makes things easy.


Now this will work great if you listen to mainstream music. You know, what everyone else listens to. There are some obscure albums in Microsoft’s library, but usually they’re not listed quite right. If you can get Album info through this method.. it’s best. It usually comes with the cover art, as well. But, as you can see.. my album loads the album art.. but the tracks are all jacked up.. so we’ll be entering info manually. Just Google for the album cover. They’re best if you can find one that’s only a few kilobytes.. since it’s so small anyways…if you are happy with the Album info you got from WMP’s database, skip the next step.

Now then.. go ahead and right click on the tracks again and choose “advanced tag editor”. This brings up a dialogue with a number of choices for filling in the info.. Album title, year, composer.. all that stuff. You can choose to do the files 1 by one.. or you can do them in bulk. The one I want to focus on is this, though. Choose the tab called “Pictures”.



So this is where we can associate album pictures with our tracks. My pictures are about 12k and sized at roughly 75x75 px.. very small. Remember they are going to be embedded into each track, so you want them to be small in size. Click on “Add” and then browse for your picture. Open in, and you should see it associated with your track now.



Just choose its type as “Cover (front)”. And click OK.

Make sure, while you are doing this, that the track numbers are all in place as well.



Now, let’s add this to our phone. You can either put the files directly onto your memory card in the my_music folder, which is probably best if you don’t have a data cable for your phone… or you can sync it right from WMP. Now, as for file names.. keep it under 32 chars, and don’t use any special characters, either.. Remember that since you plugged in all the info into the ID3 tag.. the file name is now irrelevant. You could call it “foo.mp3” and it would still work.

I’m going to sync these, for sake of consistency. So here we go, select all your tracks, right click, and choose “add to” and then “sync list”. You’ll notice that the “sync” tab in WMP now lists all of your shiny new tracks there, but no device. You have to put your phone into Sync mode. Some phones are set to do this automatically when you plug them in, or to give a little dialogue like this one:


If you see this screen, just choose sync music.

If not, go to menu->get it now(or media center)->music & tones->sync music

After a few seconds of “connecting” and “initializing” and waiting.. you will be greeted with a friendly screen that says you are connected. Now, on the computer you will also see that your phone has been recognized. Click on “Start Sync” and watch the magic.

Depending on how much music you are syncing at once… this might be a minute. Just wait it out… while you are waiting, please enjoy this:

Ok…


So on the phone, now go ahead an end the sync process and fire up your music.


And there you have it. Album art, the tracks art in the right order, id3 data is there.. and you can enjoy your music.

[brewswillis]

Wow....nice tutorial!!

[nhanson]

great tutorial....how did you do screen shots of the phone?

[Steve.G]

great tutorial....how did you do screen shots of the phone?

QPST has a Screen Capture module.

[Steve.G]

If anyone has any problems making this work, please let me know. I'd be happy to (try to) help.

[Steve.G]

Ok, so my tutorial is targeted primarily at windows users.. you mac users take heart. I found a good set of instructions for you.. here.. hope this works. I didn't write it, I just found it by Googling a bit.