Album Art Quality

[Kavik]

One of the small issues I'm having with the Zune is the quality of the album art.  The art downloaded from the Marketplace really stinks.  These jpeg images have obviously been highly compressed and when upscaled to 240x240 look even worse.

I attempted to replace the album art (folder.jpg and AlbumArtSmall.jpg) with better quality images from albumart.org.  This was a little tricky since they are hidden system files (I could only do it from the command line using attrib).  However, when I updated the library or synced, the Zune software replaced my new files with the original poor quality images.     I'm not sure if it is pulling these from a cache or from the internet--but I did uncheck the "update information from internet" option to no avail.

I really hope that MS fixes this issue as Zune has a great display and my pictures look incredible on it, but the default album art leaves a lot to be desired...

[Kbob]

Yeah, the album art is confusing and causing problems for many individuals.  I have yet to read of a solid and//or simple solution.  We can only only hope for the first round of firmware updates to do so.

[uofmrapper]

that is a big bummer to me...i just bought an ipod about a month ago and thought i'd get a zune this weekend to see which i liked better and just take back/sell the other.  one of things that drew me to the zune was the ability to have "full screen" album art while the song is playing.  i LOVE this feature, but the quality of the album art is so poor, i was sorely disappointed. 

Do we know if there is a possible fix for this or are we all just hoping right now?

[LastNirvana]

my art is not that bad. I found that if i go to google and search images for an album, i take the larget pic i can find, copy past it and it looks pretty good on the zune.

[aggiejae]

Amazon is also another great place to get your album art from.  I don't know the exact size of the pics but they are all a uniform size and look big enough that they should not show any distortion or grainyness on the Zune.

EDIT: Instead of modifying your files, try just going to Amazon and finding the album, right-click on the album art, click "Copy Picture" or something like that (I use firefox), then go to the Zune software and paste the album art.  I don't have a Zune yet but I have been playing with the software.

Let me know if this works on the device.

[uofmrapper]

I have scanned a copy of one CD i made at a resolution of 1900 x 1900.  When i drag and drop this pictures onto the album in the zune software, sync up w/ zune and look at it on the player, it is pretty grainy.  Same album/art on my ipod, full-screen album art view (click middle button twice), the picture is smaller but is much much clearer that zune. 

This confirms to me that the zunes software is SEVERLY scaling down the album art images so it doesn't matter where you get the image from, it will be downscaled to a 200x200 or maybe 240x240 image, not sure which.

[Bohlio]

Ok what i have observed is, that videos and pictures both have the Blocky look to them, The videos are really noticable in the darker areas and pictures seem to be bad... well... everywhere.

It isnt the file itself that is bad, i dont think, because a zune format WMV looks just fine on my computer, but once put on the zune (without conversion) it gets chunky. I hope the problem is not with the zune's color support...

[Kavik]

The album art problem for me lies with the images from the Marketplace (associated with music that I have downloaded).  When I open them on my computer they look bad there as well.  I've tried to replace them with better quality 200x200 images, 240x240 images and even 500x500 ones.  Each time, the Zune software replaces my new files with the old ones (I even pasted the wrong cover art in to make sure).  So it is not an issue of the software reducing the image quality uofmrapper.

I have not tried replacing album art for music I have ripped yet.  LastNirvana--how did you get this to work???

[aggiejae]

Try turning off the auto-update feature then loading your own album art.  See if it works.

[zepguitarist1968]

I dont mind the album art feature much, most of the time while im listening to music, the Zune is in my pocket and the baclight is off.

[serialtoon]

Hello everyone! I just got the Zune about an hour ago. I get home and my gf surprised me  . Anyways, onto my point here. There is an application called Album Cover Art Downloader that does a fantastic job at gathering all the art for your music. Ive used it ever since i ditched Winamp in favor for WMP11. I absolutly love it and you should try it out. It rounds up Amazon.com and Google for searching as well as some other sites. You choose the quality and your set. I always try to stick to 300x300 as it looks the best to me. Good luck!

[hookemhorns]

well once you have the right album art picture how do you like copy and paste it into WMP11?

[Kavik]

There is an application called Album Cover Art Downloader that does a fantastic job at gathering all the art for your music. Ive used it ever since i ditched Winamp in favor for WMP11. I absolutly love it and you should try it out. It rounds up Amazon.com and Google for searching as well as some other sites. You choose the quality and your set. I always try to stick to 300x300 as it looks the best to me. Good luck!

Thanks for the tip serialtoon.  However I looked for the program and it seems to be Linux only?  I found a similar piece of software called Album Art Aggregator that does the same thing and gets the art from Amazon.  Worked like a charm. 

However, I still have the same issue that the Zune software won't update the cover art.      I tried deleting the albums from my Zune and resyncing them.  I also tried deleting the albums from the library and reloading them but then the folder.jpg and AlbumArtSmall files revert back to the originals from the Zune Marketplace!!!

Anyone have any ideas???   

p.s. Auto-update feature was turned off.

[triggercut]

At least you get album art.   

[dmanbluesfreak]

Yeah, my album art wont show up on my zune, either... it shows up in the zune software on my computer, but when i synced, i none of the album covers show up - NONE!

Any ideas on that?

EDIT - sorry found the right forum - dont pay attention to this post.

[tedmales]

can the art be turned off?

[maefan625]

For my Album Art, I use a site called Frazy.com

They have album art for literally every CD out there.  Just copy and paste after clicking on the album art. 

Works beautifully.

[Gg]

I don't know how it works with MP3s but this is how it works with my WMAs.

Folder.jpg and AlbumArtSmall.jpg are completely ignored by the Zune software.  It doesn't read them, it just generates them when you set the album art.  The images it actually uses are embedded in the WMAs themselves.  You can tell this is the case because you can edit Folder.jpg and it won't show up in the Zune software.

When you paste album art into the box or just drag a file there, it always converts them to 200x200 and embeds them in all the files.  This is stupid because the main playback screen on the Zune itself shows it at 240x240, so it's guaranteed to look crappy.  They need to fix this stat.

The only way to include a higher resolution image in the file is to right click it in the Zune software, go to Edit Track Info, and then replace it on the Pictures tab.  It doesn't rescale it that way.  You can tell by playing it in Windows Media Player with the album art visualization.  (Incidentally, WMP will use Folder.jpg, but only if there's nothing embedded in the file itself.)

A neat side effect to this mess is that you can embed different images in different tracks.  It will use the one from the first track as the album art in the Zune software, but the rest could be anything.  I was thinking of making little slideshows with this, such as for a concert album having the cover for the first track, but photos from the concert for all the rest.  This was back when I thought album art would actually transfer to the Zune for me, so that's on hold until the first firmware update.  It may turn out to be more trouble than it's worth anyway, but it was a cool thought.