Displaying Album Art

Are you running Mac or Windows?  There will be solutions on either platform just would be handy to know.

Also which audio formats are you using to upload/sync to the devices?

iTunes in recent years has buggered around with Artwork when you least want it to, especially if you use libraries in the cloud/iTunes Match, and has often replaced well curated user artwork for albums with what Apple thinks it should be via cloud services.   I've not done any vinyl capture like this for a while.

Additionally iPod Classic should rely on embedded artwork when syncing as it won't have internet access to get 'Apple sourced art' so if it's not showing anything it suggests it may not be embedding the artwork properly these days.

I'm using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10.

I find album art is automatically provided for the Classic in iTunes around 75% of the time and virtually 100% for the Sony in MediaGo. If artwork is not displayed when ripping CD's I just find it on the internet, save a copy then in the "Get Info" bit when you right click I go in and add the artwork. 

Unfortunately this doesn't work for either player so I find myself more than a little bit stumped.

As you have dBpoweramp, just right click on the file and you should see the 'edit ID' option. Click that and you will see the metadata. At the bottom is the option to add art, either from the internet of from your own files. 

dBPoweramp may be worth a shot then import to iTunes, however you may need to reset iPod to clear cache of media without artwork.

Queried with a friend who's excellent with iTunes especially on Windows, I've quoted his reply below:

If you have Edit > Preferences > Store > Share details about your library enabled then iTunes will attempt to download store art for newly imported media that doesn't already have embedded artwork. It shouldn't override anything already embedded in a tag. The Get Info artwork tab can be used to embed artwork. I would recommend 300-600px square .jpg images. You cannot add artwork to tracks in .wav format or that are read only, although iTunes might be able to associate store artwork. Back in the day if there was art missing from a classic there was a workaround which allowed you not to include art on the device, then add it back again. That option was removed and the only option now is to restore the device to correct any errors in the artwork cache. iTunes will show art as long as at least one track has artwork, I think the classic always uses the art of the first track so if this is missing there is no image regardless of what is in the other tracks. (Haven't had one for years.) See also Grouping tracks into albums (below) for tips on preventing repeated artwork images, or having tracks from two albums lumped together.

http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/grouping.asp

I no longer have dBpoweramp as the trial version expired.

The files imported into iTunes (and MediaGo) are .wav so that explains iTunes not showing the artwork.

Reluctant to pay for dBpoweramp in case I can't get it to work. 

Thanks for the replies so far.

If ripping CDs for iPod use Apple Lossless (ALAC) encoder in Preferences which will support the artwork and retain CD quality.

As it's lossless you can always convert to .WAV for other uses if you need to.

There must be an audio converter in Windows that will convert wav to ALAC too for your recordings - what are you using to edit the vinyl recordings?

Foobar 2000 maybe if you don't want dbPoweramp?

http://www.foobar2000.org/encoderpack

I'm using DMP Mark Editor, the software included with the PMD661 to edit the vinyl recordings. There are probably better out there but at least I can use it.

The answer to your dilema, Steve, is simple... there's a product called BLISS that runs on PC or Mac and is designed to integrate artwork into your music files... that's all it does fundamentally, although its designer has added additional tagging facilities that allow you to correct / update / modify even more of the metadata.

I would thoroughly recommend you download it, you get a number of free updates in order to see it working in your system and then it's something like £30 for 1,000 updates.  There's also a life-time licence which takes away the restriction on the number of updates - I had a few thousand tracks to check so this option was the one I eventually took.

I have to tell you that I consider the album artwork to be an essential part of my music library;  on the odd occasion where BLISS doesn't find artwork online (& it checks several music databases) you have the option to upload your own artwork, which I do for the occasional obscure CD that I rip, scanning the artwork from the actual CD.  I'll also admit to having a few even more obscure tracks where there is no artwork to be found anywhere... luckily Bliss allows me to upload a photo from my family album, so I can have a picture of  myself as the album artwork 

OK, I haven't actually done this 'myself' artwork, but my point is that this software is very flexible, and for the most part it just trundles through your music library by itself, putting things right.

 As I said, try it !

Will try Bliss. Hope it's as simple as you make it sound.

Thanks for al the help guys.

Regards, Steve O.

Other options are Picard and SongKong, these can both find artwork and embed it in your files. But if your files are WAV then when added to iTunes it will not recognise any existing metadata in the Wav file, therefore if you then use iTunes to sync to your iPod you still wont have any metadata. iTunes may recognise the artwork if it is stored as a folder.jpg in the same folder as the album I am not sure give it a go. If it does work then you should be able to use one of these tools to save the files to the harddrive as a folder.jpg as well as embedding in the file.

Hi SteveO 

ive encountered similar artwork issues myself while getting my headfi up and running.  I particularly wanted to spend more time listening to the hi res files i have purchased in recent years on the go. It turns out that the folder.jpg option might fool the HDX into displaying but not my Sony 1z or my Fiio X5iii.  I knew nothing of embedding artwork or the poor artwork handling capabilities of my WAV files.  Im a mac user and have used Metadatics for correcting metadata where its gone wrong. i solved my issue by making FLAC copies of my HD files ( using DBpoweramp) then attaching the folder.jpg image (drag and drop) to all the tracks in each album in Metadatics.  Was a long old job but as you say, quite pleasing to have the artwork show up on your dap. good luck!