itunes artwork?

[glager]

i just got my WDTV Live SMB.  I moved my itunes library via itunes client  to my NAS with all the files in there native ituens formats.  i can play the music fine but I'd like to have the album artwork displayed.  What's the best way to do that?

[TonyPh12345]

Embed the artwork into the M4A / AAC / MP3 files using ID3 tags.

[mike27oct]

Can you see ANY album art at all; can you see some, but not all album art on TV screen?

Can you see, some, if not all, album art in iTunes program on your PC?

Depending upon your answers and how you transferred the files may affect what you see and don't see on TV.

Submit your answers and we can go from there.

[glager]

I can't see any artwork via the Folders view. In the Media Library view i can see some.  I'd say less than 50%.   When playing the music it displays all the correct info.  Artist, Album, etc... 

In Itunes  the are about a dozen albums without artwork but that is because iTunes can't find it when I attempt to update it.

I transferred the files by using the iTunes client on windows xp.  I changed the destination of my library to my shared drive and had iTunes copy everything over.  I didn't do anything manually. 

thanks in advance.

[mike27oct · Accepted solution]

I believe these kinds of artwork problems originate with iTunes itself, and there doesn't seem to be a fix for all problems, although I have fixed some in my situation.  Here's why I say this:

A copy of my entire iTunes Media  folder (aka iTunes Music folder on older systems)  with around 9000 tracks is on a hard drive connected to my WDTV Plus.  This data on the drive is also my backup of ALL my iTunes Media, so periodically I update it, along with all the iTunes library files in case I every need to reconstruct my original iTunes-related files.

What I am about to describe relates to when the WDTV plays a music track from the hard drive or through the network via media server or network shares.  I do not see the artwork on TV for some tracks, and the problem is album-related, i.e. artwork is not seen for all tracks of some albums.  Even if I see the artwork in iTunes on PC, the artwork may not be seen when played by WDTV.   Sometimes I can only see the artwork and song title; the album name, artist and genre are blank and not seen via WDTV even if seen in iTunes. 

 I attribute all these sorts of problems to iTunes, as some CDs were put into iTunes using different versions of iTunes over the years.   A lot of my iTunes music is from downloads from my music service, eMusic. (much better and less expensive than iTunes Store; in fact, I have no music purchased from ITunes store; just from eMusic.)  Most of these albums from eMusic show the artwork in iTunes and via WDTV.  It seems the problem is worse with music imported from my CDs.

If you look inside your iTunes folders on PC you will see only music tracks, unless you have your Folder Views to also show system folders and files.  If set this way, you will also see artwork files, but not all folders have these files. I believe thse artwork files help WDTV see art.  BTW, it is not advisable to have Views set permanently to show system files.  Temporay set this way, OK, but return to them being hidden when done looking at folders/files this way.

Anyway, with some minor tweaking, I have caused some artwork to show that wasn't before.  As for others that I can't get to show up, TO HECK WITH THEM.  I don't need to strain my brain about it.  What really counts is that the music files are there and WDTV can play them all.

[SanitysEdge]

I've had issues with WDTV and my transformer i use Musicbrainz Picard to retag and sort my library and i use MP3tag for album art it embeds directly to each mp3 the album art it's library of album art is pretty good if you can 't find it you can always copy an image off the net and put it in.