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[TimAlexander]

I've noticed that the album art for any podcast from NPR is only half displayed.  I get the top half of the picture, but then the bottom half is a series of dots or lines.  I see this with:

NPR: All Songs Considered
NPR: Car Talk
NPR: Driveway Moments
NPR: Sunday Puzzle
NPR: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

Eek.  I didn't realize I was such an NPR geek!

Is this something that might be fixed by removing a file in the folder of each podcast, or is it something that's part of the download process?  None of my other 30-odd podcasts exhibit this behavior.

MC 12.0.363
3G Nano - but the messy art shows up in MC, too.

[glynor]

I've seen this too on many of my NPR Podcasts, including NPR All Politics.  Never bothered to complain though.

[Matt]

It seems to be a problem with the file itself.

For example, this MP3 didn't show full art in any player I tried:
http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/1039/14719236/npr_14719236.mp3

[TimAlexander]

Interesting.  I downloaded that file and opened it in Tag & Rename.  The album art is fine.  I played it in MC and the art was only half there.  I opened it in iTunes and the album art displayed correctly.  WMP didn't display any art.

I've removed all of the other media players I had on my system, so those are the only ones I could check.  The important observation is that the art included in the file appears to be fine.  Isn't the art located at the end of the mp3?  Is it possible that any tags the player might add are causing a problem, either because the JPG is improperly terminated or the tags are starting in an odd location?  Just a thought.

This isn't a huge issue.  More of a minor annoyance/observation.

[Matt]

After a little more digging, it looks like NPR is using software that writes invalid MP3 IDv2 tags.

The tags say they're v2.4, which is fine.

However, when presenting the size of the picture frame, they're not using a 28-bit sync-safe integer like the spec calls for.  Instead, they're using a standard 32-bit integer.  This causes MC to only (correctly) see 11 of the 22 available KB of the picture.

The spec is here:
http://id3.org/id3v2.4.0-structure

Code: [Select]

   The frame ID is followed by a size descriptor containing the size of
   the data in the final frame, after encryption, compression and
   unsynchronisation. The size is excluding the frame header ('total
   frame size' - 10 bytes) and stored as a 32 bit synchsafe integer.

There's not much we can do, because if we switch to 32-bit integers here, it will break support for correctly saved tags.

[TimAlexander]

Makes sense.  Thanks for checking into this.  Again, not the end of the world.  I appreciate the time and effort.

[Matt]

Makes sense.  Thanks for checking into this.  Again, not the end of the world.  I appreciate the time and effort.

If NPR has a feedback channel, it might be good to let them know.

WMP doesn't show the images either, so we're not alone on this.