OT question about functionality / reliability of cover management on iPods

[Michael Neumeier]

Hi all,

I have an iPod classic 160 GB black here and I wonder since quite some months about the functionality and reliability of cover management on these devices. As I didn´t find any real answers to this issue, I thought it might be a good idea to ask here if somebody can point me the way to some explanations.

Let me shortly explain which problem I am facing. First of all, you should know from which devices I am synchronizing my iPod:

- on one side, from Kubuntu 8.04 with Amarok 1.4.9.1 (KDE 3.5.10)
- on the other side from MacOS 10.6 with iTunes 9.0.2 (25)

Both sides are getting the mp3 from a external hd, formatted with NTFS (as I also want friends with Windows being able to access it).

I rebuilt the whole collections some time ago on the Mac, using a tool called "CoverScout", so in all (!) mp3-files, the cover is now stored.

If I synchronize the iPod, I face two different problems:

- either covers are not stored at all on the iPod, although they are present on the external hd
- if covers are e.g. visible via Cover Flow in the iPod, no cover is however shown when playing a track

As these results do occur both from Linux and Mac, I am blaming the iPod itself - am I right or wrong?

Regards,
Michael