OT question about functionality / reliability of cover management on iPods

[Seb Ruiz]

2009/12/25 Michael Neumeier <dennismail at gmx.net>:
> 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?

Hi Michael,
You'll find that artwork is handled in two different locations for
ipods/itunes: on the ipod, there is a separate artwork database which
is written (which is different to the information about songs). On
itunes, artwork is recovered from the embedded image meta tag from the
files. It is possible that the ipod uses both locations in different
circumstances, which is why coverflow works but individual art
doesn't.

Amarok will copy artwork to this secondary database when copying
tracks - but only if your ipod has been correctly initialised to do so
(there is a manual step you must take - search the amarok wiki for
ipods). Amarok 1.4 has the ability to synchronise cover art between
your local collection and the ipod, if it can find matching metadata
(artist/album/title), but only if Amarok has the artwork registered
with the albums (rather than embedded in the tag data for each song).

Hope this helps you out a bit. I can't give you specific instructions
because you have a rather unique circumstance!

Seb

-- 
Seb Ruiz

http://www.sebruiz.net/
http://amarok.kde.org/