Album art missing in tracks

Got a 2018 Prius Prime and having trouble with the album art display on audio. I have my audio collection of 4,408 tracks /434 folders / 19.3 GB stored on a DanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 32 GB thumb drive. I used Mp3tag to set the metadata when I ripped all my CDs. I can see all the album art just fine in Mp3tag.

But when I plug it into my Prius I get the album art on some tracks and not on others. No patterns. It just seems like the album art disappears for some tracks.

The MP3s are stored in the recommended artist/album/track format. What am I missing here?

 

Thanks for the info. I read through another thread (Album Art Prius Prime Advance | PriusChat) that showed up in the "similar threads" list below this one. Apparently, as a feature and not a bug, album art is NOT displayed while the vehicle is moving as a safety feature to avoid distracting the driver. A lot of owners question that wisdom for obvious reasons. So do I, but I get the reasoning.

However, when I was helping my wife set up the audio, we were parked at home with the e-brake on. It was under those conditions that I formulated my original question. Sometimes we get the album art and sometimes we don't. Still experimenting but it seems to have something to do with the button pressing sequence. I'll report back here when I know more.

One other point of note ... in that other thread someone suggested that to get the album art to display the images had to be square with a resolution of 600-700 pixels. I checked my album art and very few are exactly square. Most are nearly square, as album art tends to be, say 600x598 or thereabouts. I have checked this on our Prius and I'm getting non-square album art to display just fine.

 

Yeah, 4408 tracks might take awhile. Gotta ask, when you say "re-tag" do you mean just opening the file w/ MP3tag and then saving it? I mean, I've already got all the metadata I need in those files. Or are you saying you started with the raw audio files and then added all the metadata from scratch?

 

I just ran some other tests and confirmed my earlier suspicions: It makes no difference whether the image is exactly square or not. That's for the ones that DO display as well as the ones that don't. I'll try using a few album art images from Wiki and see if that makes a difference. I'm not sure the actual image size makes any difference as long as it's reasonably clear. Those Wiki images are 200-300px, and most of my album art is 300-600px. I'll see what happens and report back here.

 

OK, I tried swapping out some of the existing album art images that didn't display with replacements DLed from Wiki. Some of them displayed, others didn't. Maybe it's just some "magic" aspect ratio that gets blocked, maybe images with odd numbers of pixels that leave remainders when scaled, maybe just a software glitch. I don't know. Gonna try some other things and report back again. Whether or not I do solve this puzzle, this will be a useful thread for others doing troubleshooting.

 

Still experimenting with the aspect ratio thing, but your comment about ID3 version made me check. I'm using MP3tag to prepare my audio files, so I looked at the settings you mentioned. Here's what it says. Does this look OK to you?

 

Cool. Seemed like the logical settings.

No, there's no album art when moving, but we expected that from what we read elsewhere on this forum. We're talking about when the car is in "park" and we're just browsing the music. That's where the cover art system breaks down for us.

I'm still running some experiments here, using MusicBrainz Picard to tag the files. Work in progress.

 

PROBLEM SOLVED!

After trying everything I could think of (read through this thread) I finally hit on the solution. Got the idea on a Tesla forum where owners are having similar album art issues.

First, I'm talking here about the 2018 Prius with what is called "Entune Premium Audio" (I believe that's v2.0 as they're only now rolling out v3.0). And this is for music stored on a USB 3.0 flash drive (SanDisk 32 GB). But I have the feeling what I discovered would apply in other scenarios as well. Also, I'm talking here about seeing the album art while parked. I know it's shut down when you're moving.

My music files are stored as: artist/albums/songs. Some are just: artist/songs or album/songs (for artists with only one album). But I'm not sure if the actual folder structure is that important as long as the music has the correct MP3 tags.

So what made my album art start appearing consistently across my entire collection was adding the album art to the album folder. After getting no progress with MP3tag I tried another highly recommended app called Tag& Rename. There's a selection in the Tools menu that has no equivalent in MP3tag (as far as I can tell). The Tools menu has these two actions:

1. Extract folder cover art from files tag.
2. Add folder cover art to files tag.

All my individual music files were tagged with their album art, but the folders themselves showed no art when selected. After running those two actions in the order listed my album folders now all have album art. And I now see that art consistently on my dash display.

I read elsewhere that this can also be done by placing the album art inside the album folder and naming it folder.jpg, but that may depend on what system is playing your music. What I know for sure is this method works for my 2018 Prius Prime.