how to get album artwork appearing in controller from music from itunes

Hi User68117,

For tracks that are missing from your iTunes Music Library, we recommend starting with the steps here. See if the tracks are being indexed under Folders or if they aren't indexing at all.

If you're still having trouble, can you please submit a diagnostic from your system and reply back with your confirmation number following an update of your music library?

Thanks

Hi Ryan Thanks for reply However I'm not missing songs just the artwork Best wishes Steve

Hi User68117,

iTunes handles artwork for songs differently than most other music applications, including Sonos.  If you use the iTunes 'Get Album Artwork', it is stored in an Apple proprietary format which is not accessible to other applications directly.

There are multiple options available.

1) If you already have the artwork in iTunes.  (simplest option 🙂 )

From iTunes, find the song, select 'Get Info' and then the artwork tab.

From there you can copy the artwork (Ctrl-C on windows  - sorry dont know how to do this on Apple) and then paste it to the directory where the songs are placed.  Save the file as folder.jpg in the album directory - you can see where this is from the Get Info / Summary tab .

You can also just drag the artwork to your desktop if required.

2) Use mp3tag - windows only (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/)  you can navigate to the Itune music directory and embed the artwork in the file. Sonos will then pick this up, as will other players.  Once you've done this, you can go to ITunes, pick a song from the album, right-click, select 'get info' and itunes will then use this artwork.

It will find the artwork from amazon.com or amazon.de as well as use discogs and musicbrainz to get additional information about the album - especially useful for compilations and correcting data.

mp3tag can also fix a variety of other issues for you.

3) Use a site such as www.allcdcovers.com and download high-quality covers and place it in the album directory as folder.jpg as per (1).  You may need to resize them to around something like 600x600 to 750x750 provide good artwork especially if you use playback outside of Sonos via chromecast or something on a tv screen.

iTunes will not use the folder.jpg file, but Sonos and other applications will.

 

If you make any updates in this way, you will need to tell Sonos to update the Music library. In Windows Sonos App,  Manage -> Update Music Library.

There maybe other options, especially if you use Apple, but the above works for me.

 All the options have their merits, just means a little computer time to sort it all out.

 Hope this helps.

Rgds

 

Graham

 

 

Thanks Graham for the detailed post. Those are great directions for getting the Album Artwork for your tracks.

If you usually use iTunes to manage your library, there can sometimes be issues with the Artwork as iTunes stores a lot of their metadata in cached folders, unavailable outside their infrastructure. 

Please let us know if you're still having trouble. This page also has some good information to read. 

Hi Graham & Ryan

Many thanks for your help, that's great

best wishes

STeve

I too am missing album art when I look at my music library in the Sonos Controller. I have my iTunes library on a NAS drive and point the Sonos controller to the iTunes level folder so that I can import my playlists. Most of my music is CD rips with some iTunes purchases. Of course album art comes with any purchased music. When I rip a CD I would scan the CD booklet if iTunes did not find the art on Gracenote and add that art through the Get Info panel. I turns out that the albums that were missing art in Sonos were the ones where I ripped the CD and iTunes found the art in Gracenote. I was able to fix the missing art problem by clicking on the problem album in iTunes, selecting all the tracks and the opening the Get Info panel. I go to the album art tab, click the art (it's there because iTunes found it in Gracenote) do a command-c to copy it to the clip board. I then hit the delete key and then hit command-v to past it back. It's tedious when you have 200 albums without are but it's faster than coping an image file to each album folder.

Hi, has anyone found an automated solution to this?!? I have 80+gb of music all properly ID3 tagged with album covers from iTunes and yet none (rather, very few) are displaying in the sonos controller app. There must be a better way than manually downloading and saving to each unique folder the album artwork, no?

Thanks, John

Use the Automatic taggers. Tag & Rename is one. It's going to take time, either way.

I am confused - all my music is in iTunes and is on a NAS and on my iPad. Sonos can show all the artwork on the iPad but cannot show the vast majority of the same artwork in the library. No doubt this is due to the way that the apple device is handling the same data, but it does imply that Sonos could do something different with the controller / library settings. What am I missing?

Niall_5,

Basically, iTunes stores artwork in a proprietary area. Ryan's post above leads to good information about how to deal with the situation.

Apple is constantly changing things. You can view this as an effort to improve their products or a way to control the competition. If a competing product attempts to constantly follow Apple, most of the 3rd party's development effort will be limited to reacting to Apple's changes, rather than innovating on their own products.

I'm using a Bridge / Connect with a NAS drive. The easiest way I've found to get the album art to appear is to locate the art online using something like Google images, find a resolution of more than 300 px, or shoot it yourself then resize the image, copy & paste it into the album folder that contains the tracks or songs, then change rename the image to folder.jpg pay attention that you don't use jpeg, it won't work if you do. As long as that file is in the folder with the songs Sonos is smart enough that it will recognize it as a image & it'll work

Hi there - please could you update the link for the "good information to read" - it seems to be broken. Thks

Blanklook wrote:

Hi there - please could you update the link for the "good information to read" - it seems to be broken. Thks

You bet. It should be working now. Let us know if you have any questions.

Ryan S wrote:

Blanklook wrote:

Hi there - please could you update the link for the "good information to read" - it seems to be broken. Thks

You bet. It should be working now. Let us know if you have any questions.

I have the same issue too...

The link "starting with the steps here" is also broken, the first you posted Ryan.

I've just discovered I have this problem and I think I'm using a solution that hasn't been mentioned before. It still requires work, but doesn't require you copying and pasting downloads into directories etc.

1. Download the album artwork (I use Google image search and just pick a decent res image).
2. Open the album within iTunes, select all the tracks and 'Get Info' for all of them together.
3. Tab to 'Artwork'.
4. Click 'Add Artwork' (even if there's already some showing) and point to the artwork you've just downloaded.

This will re-upload the artwork to the album and then it'll just appear in your Sonos controller. I've found I don't have to force Sonos to update the music library for it to appear. At most, just move the album list in the controller up and down a bit for it to appear.

I've also checked that if you delete the album from iTunes and the Sonos controller, then re-import them to both, the artwork remains intact so you don't need to worry when moving an iTunes library to a new location or rebuilding either iTunes or Sonos.

Can't guarantee it'll work for everybody but that's how I'm 'slowly' getting the job done.

Hope it helps,
Ben

iTunes uses a way that may bug Sonos (and probably other media player) with the way in stores artwork.

On a Mac, the best solution I found is this $2 software piece:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=savealbumartjpeg

Having just reread the thread, it appears Tom Grzybala suggested over a year ago what I suggested 3 days ago. So that'll teach me for not reading a thread fully fully before posting. Idiot boy (me, not Tom...)!

I do have same issues. My entire collection is tagged using Mp3Tag and artwork is shown in other players like iTunes and Plex Media Server/Player. Does Sonos have any other requirement to read the embedded artwork?