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[risingdamp]

I'm scratching my head here so hoping someone clever in this forum can help me understand what might be happening.  The problem I have is the Ford Sync Touchscreen system in my car displays album art for some files but not for others and it's really annoying.  I can't see any pattern which would explain why some show ok and some don't.  All my files have been maintained in MC since v9 for many years and my devices are synched with MC21.

This is on a 500GB USB2 hard drive formatted as exFAT (Ford Sync won't read NTFS) and sycronised as a virtual handheld using MC.  All the files are in Albut Artist Auto\Album folders

Here's what i know so if anyone can think of anything else I can try please let me know:

1. iPod wasn't working either but when I changed to include tags inside file, initialised and resynced it worked fine but the same process on the USB drive has not worked.
2. I doubt it's about the number of files as the iPod, which now works, has 16k files on it whereas the HDD only has 11K.
3. Its not down to image size because the images on the albums that don't show cover art are fairly small e.g. 200px * 200px or smaller.

The reason I want to use th HDD instead of the iPod is two-fold. 1, sometimes Ford has problems indexing the iPod so voice commands are not available whereas the HDD seems to get indexed quite quickly and 2, the HDD opens up the chance to hold a lot more albums than my iPod can hold.

Can anyone think of any reason why the album art does not always display?

[risingdamp]

One thing I would like to try is to remove all the tags entirely from one of the affected albums and then reapply the tags in ID3v2.3 format, with the cover art inside the file. 

Is this something I can do within MC21?  Can I delete all the tags from the files whilst maintaining the tags in the database and then add the tags back using the data in the MC database?

[blgentry]

Am I allowed to say how much I hate for Sync here?  No?  Oh darn. 

Sync might have some unusual limitations on art size or art type.  I've seen both JPG and PNG art in some files.  Many players will not read PNG cover art.  There's a possibility that a certain small size of art is also not readable.  Or a certain aspect ratio. 

Here's a thread I found discussing this.  I did NOT read it all.

http://www.focusfanatics.com/forum/mk3-focus/310382-album-art-isnt-appearing-myford-touch.html

Good luck.

Brian.

[risingdamp]

Thanks for replying.

I'm pretty sure I've looked at all of those threads.  The thing that's confusing me is the same file is synced to an iPod and shows the art but does not on the USB drive.  So I'm thinking there is some background processing going on with the way the tags are read or indexed but I can't think what that might be.  It look very random but we all know nothing is ever random.

[risingdamp]

Well after all that it looks like I'm giving up on the idea of replacing my iPod Classic with a higher capacity USB drive.  Sync only wants to index the first 12k ish files although on my iPod it indexes them all.  Shame as it would have been cool to have access to my full 70k library of MP3s in the car.

[BigAL88]

I don't normally reply to this sort of post but I had the same problem on my Ford Mondeo which was very annoying. All you need to do is rip the CD on to Windows Media player. Then open then CD in Media Player so that the artwork is displayed in the small preview box along side the track listing. Then open an internet browser and search for the CD artwork via a Google image search. Then right click on the artwork that you want and select copy. Then paste this into Media Player over the top of the existing image (whether or not it is the same as you've just copied) and select the option to Paste Artwork. Then sync the files to your USB stick. This is absolutely guaranteed to work. Enjoy