Problem regarding displaying images in some media players

Support
1

Hello Community,

(I already opened this one in the German part of this community, I am quite desperate and trying to get every help I can get)

I do hope, that somebody is able to help me here. My problem is quite strange and no solution or reason could be found so far.

Situation:
I have many folders with mp3-files. Some folders contain only few (e.g. 10), some many (hundreds).

With MP3Tag I add tags to these files, to display them in different media players. I use tags like title, album, author and most importantly the cover pictures.

I am using the multimedia players in my car and on my mobile phone. The latter being the Odyssey player (from F-Droid).
Another location for seeing the images are the explorer views, e.g. on my mobile phone.

Now for the problem.
I want to display different images (only one per file, not multiple types of covers) for each file.
As an example, there might be an audiobook, with every chapter having its own image.
Like this:

Filename Title Image
File 1.mp3 Intro Frontcover of the book
File 2.mp3 Chapter 1 - Teil 1 Chapter 1 Bild
File 3.mp3 Chapter 1 - Teil 2 Chapter 1 Bild
File 4.mp3 Chapter 1 - Teil 3 Chapter 1 Bild
File 5.mp3 Chapter 2 - Teil 1 Chapter 2 Bild
File 6.mp3 Chapter 2 - Teil 2 Chapter 2 Bild
File 7.mp3 Epilogue Final Image

In this example 7 audio files would habe been connected to four pictures.

In MP3Tag everything is correctly displayed. Every picture is attached to the right file.

The file explorer in the mobile phone also shows the correct pictures as icons.

The problem that occurs is different at times. The most common types are the following:

1 Both players (mobile phone and car) only show one image for every file. The image shown is the one that is attached to the first file. (In the example it would be the book's front cover)

2 Both players show the pictures with a different combination (both the same), for example as follows:

Filename Title Image
File 1.mp3 Intro Frontcover of the book
File 2.mp3 Chapter 1 - Teil 1 Frontcover of the book
File 3.mp3 Chapter 1 - Teil 2 Chapter 1 Bild
File 4.mp3 Chapter 1 - Teil 3 Chapter 1 Bild
File 5.mp3 Chapter 2 - Teil 1 Chapter 2 Bild
File 6.mp3 Chapter 2 - Teil 2 Frontcover of the book
File 7.mp3 Epilogue Final Image

Case 1 is the most common one.

I tried or checked the following:

I emptied the caches, including a check in a different car.

I deleted every file, that resided in the folder, including hidden ones (like cover.jpg, album.jpg, folder.jpg, etc.)

The pictures themselves have no faults. When I change the pictures, for example if I would combine a chapter-picture with the first file, then this will be displayed for all the files.

I checked the tags and copied all the tags from files, that work fine. No difference to the error.

There is no service running, like grabbing cover images from the internet. The pictures are to a large part changed by me, so that is not the reason.

If I combine that MP3Tag shows everything correctly, and the two players show an identical behaviour, I suppose there might be a common reason somewhere that might be changed by me.
I checked MPEG 1 oder MPEG 2 and it made no difference.
There are different tag types and versions, I do not know whether that could be of relevance.

Also intriguing is, that not every folder has the problem. So what could be the difference?

I also tested to spilt up a huge folger with 150 files in 5 folders. No difference.

Another test was, that I copied the third file first. It went well, the correct picture was shown. Then I copied the rest of the files and alas! every file had the same image, even the third file now showed the picture of the first file.

Any ideas?

Thank you for reading and helping!

2

Please note that changing the tags does not add functions to a player. So if a player cannot cope with different embedded pictures for files belonging to an album, then that's the way it is.

Only you with your environment can test if the player can be tricked e.g. with different folder structures which contain only 1 file from an album plus an external picture file.
But I would not be too confident, that this really works.
Perhaps you have to modify the data in ALBUM so that you get a new album name for each file.
But this is all beyond the control of MP3tag and has to be investigated by you in your environment.
Eventually, it may be worth a try to use a different player.

3

This is exactly right. Many players, especially on the mobile side, limit their library tracking of the images for an album to the one found in the first file. There just isn't enough space on most devices to dedicate a library file that could end up with 10-20x the image links just to support this. This is the same reason these mobile apps choose to limit which tags they actually use in order to comprimise between flexibility and practicality for their libraries.

But the fact you can clearly see in mp3tag and even some file explorers that the image for each file is clearly different, means that they do in fact have these unique images attached. There are other player apps available, perhaps test drive a few others to see if they meet your needs.

If you really want to verify this is the case for any specific app, you may want to check with their support to see if they can confirm if a solution exists for what you are seeking.

1 Like
4

So there is one idea, thank you very much.

I was not aware that some players would distinguish some information by the ALBUM tag.
There are some folders, were I use the ALBUM Tag also as a counter, by combining it with the TRACK-tag. Like in

Name of the Book - 1/10
Name of the Book - 2/10
...

I will check, whether I used in the erroneous folders only one content in the album tag.

For your other remarks. I was hoping for something like "If the player only supports ver. xy of tagging then it comes to errors, also regarding the images, because of..."

The different folder structures would hinder my use case. The foremost usecase is to listen to e.g. long audiobooks while driving in my car. So it should play the files in sequence, without me having to manually switch the folder after every file.

There might be other players that do the trick, but I cannot change the one in the car. So I am hoping for the ALBUM being the solution like mentioned above.

The interesting thing to all of it is, that I have many folders, where it works. So there must be something different between the working ones and the not working ones. And I hope the difference might be one, I can influence. The ALBUM tag for sure is one, so I will test it.

Thank you very much and I will update this thread when I have new informations. Also any other suggestions are more than welcome.

5

So guys, that did it. At least for the player on the mobile phone. The player in the car will be checked later. When that is also successful, I will close this thread as solved.

Thanks a lot!

6

So it works in all players.
I added a counter at the end of the Album tag.
That did it.

7

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