MP3 player and album art

pacbowl

I recently got a new Memorex 4gb mp3 player to replace a broken Rio. It's got all the nifty features like video, radio, voice record, etc...but was very cheap, like $30 from woot so it's not high end. When it's hooked up to the computer it shows as just a regular MTP device, like a flash drive. It doesn't synch with Windows Media Player or iTunes or anything. Just drag-n-drop mp3s into the music folder. There's no proprietary software involved and I didn't install any drivers or anything to get it to read.

I loaded up a bunch of mp3s on it last night that I have ripped from my own CDs (no album art or anything) so they are just straight up mp3s. HOWEVER, this is whats racking my brain. On most of the mp3s, it has the album art on-screen when playing. Admittedly some of the mp3s have been procured through shady means over the past 10 years, but it's even showing art on those obscure, remix mp3s. Where is it getting the album art from? I know mp3s don't contain album art info and I didn't copy any .jpgs or other images onto the player. The device itself isn't accessing the internet, so what the hell? I highly doubt the device has a huge library of album art in it.

It's obviously not a problem. I'm just very curious where it's getting the art from and if anyone has an idea on where they are coming from.

.kbf?

If the mp3s have any meta data attached to them and the player has wifi capabilities it could just be downloading the album art.

pacbowl

.kbf? wrote: »

If the mp3s have any meta data attached to them and the player has wifi capabilities it could just be downloading the album art.

It has no wifi and hasn't made any outgoing internet requests. As far as I can tell the device is not accessing the internet at all.

.kbf?

A bit of googling told me that it's actually possible to embed the album art into the mp3s. Is album art being displayed for your entire collection or is it missing for some songs?

Zxerol

Yep, ID3v2 metadata for MP3s can contain album art. Some taggers (like Mp3tag) can read them and allow you to change/delete them. Also, it might be reading a folder.jpg file, which are usually hidden.

pacbowl

I'm sure there's no hidden album art.jpg folder so it must be reading the ID3v2 on the mp3s that have it. It's missing some songs and there's no real pattern to them, so it has to be ID3v2. I didn't know they could do that. Maybe there's something in my ripper that's encoding them into the mp3s but I had no idea that could be done. Thanks for the pointers.

L|ama

It doesn't have to be a full folder, there can just be random hidden .jpgs in the album folder but they will show up with 'view hidden files/folders' on anyway (assuming you're on windows).