Kinoma Notes

While play­ing your music, Kinoma Play dis­plays your big, beau­ti­ful album art center-stage. But what if you find a track with­out album art?

This post is the defin­i­tive guide to all the places Kinoma Play looks for album art. Plus, it describes how you can add miss­ing album art.

Where does Kinoma Play look for album art?

Kinoma Play automag­i­cally finds album art in all of these places:

• Embed­ded album art — Kinoma Play looks for album art embed­ded right within the music file itself. This includes album art stored in MP3 ID3 meta­data, WMA meta­data, and M4A (iTunes) metadata.
• Exter­nal “folder.jpg” files – If there’s a file called “folder.jpg” in the same folder as the music file, that will be used as its album art. Usu­ally, this file is marked as invisible.
• Microsoft album art files — Win­dows Media Player has its own way of asso­ci­at­ing exter­nal album art. It embeds a unique ID into WMA and MP3 files that gets an asso­ci­ated album art file, which must be in the same folder. The files will look some­thing like “AlbumArt_{62E1C2F9-9EF7-4983-AD18-F6216918CBDA}_Large.jpg”, with the ID in braces match­ing the ID of the cor­re­spond­ing music file. These album art files are also usu­ally set to be invisible.

How do I add miss­ing album art?

All the music man­agers that we use pro­vide a way to fix miss­ing album art. Here are spe­cific instruc­tions for a few of them:

• iTunes — Select tracks with miss­ing album art, then choose Advanced > Get Album Art­work. (Tip: If you’re still not see­ing the right art­work in Kinoma Play, you might have mul­ti­ple album cov­ers in your file. Choose Get Info for indi­vid­ual prob­lem tracks, go to the Album tab, delete all album cov­ers and try again.)
• Win­dows Media Player — In Tools > Options, go to the Library tab and make sure “Retrieve addi­tional infor­ma­tion from the Inter­net” is checked. Then choose Tools > Apply media infor­ma­tion changes to save album art and other meta­data back to your music files.
• Media Mon­key — Select tracks with miss­ing album art, then right-click and choose Auto-Tag from Web. Use the pop-down menu at the top to choose the best album art, select the meta­data you want to use (check “Cover” to update the album art), then select the tracks you want to update (check the top check­box for all selected tracks).

With album art for all of your tracks, Kinoma Play can make your music look as good as it sounds!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Kinoma FreePlay, Kinoma Play, Troubleshooting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.