So... my pops got me a fancy schmancy 30GB 5G iPod for xmas, without me asking. I'm not complaining.

I wasn't here when it got delivered by Fed-Ex, they ship it back to factory, then back to me and I finally got it yesterday.

I spent the past week getting album art for 98% of my 90+ GB of music rocking in iTunes using iArt, a decent $10 PC shareware app for doing just that.

I load up the iPod with about 25GB, and it won't play, it just skips tracks... 1, 2, 3, 4, showing name but won't play. Sometimes the album art shows after a few seconds before it skips to the next track... sometimes it'll play a few seconds then skip to the next track. Other times it just locks up for minutes at a time.

So I reformat it, and try again, same result. Start doing research... similar symptoms for others on the apple support forums... related to album art (sometimes lyrics). So I turn off "show album art on iPod"... bingo. Everything plays fine after iTunes deletes all the album art from the iPod.

So I start with the hypothisis that the album art gathering program I used hosed the tags and the iPod is choking. So I go through and change a field for all the tracks in a batch in iTunes (BPM), then remove it, so that iTunes was the last thing to touch the tags and hopefully cleaned them up to it's liking.

Then I wonder if it's the massive amount of album art I have (nearly every track) so I start loading up small chunks at a time and checking it out. All seems to be working fine until I get to the K's... and bam, it starts happening again, locking up and whatnot. So it's not the tag issue. Must just be the album art database size.

Anyone else have this issue? Any ideas what to do about it? I'm thinking about making a static page describing the issue and posting it all over the mac sites and forums.

Presumably the album art is stored as JPEG. I imagine you could lower the quality and/or resolution to save on space, although you do wish this sort of thing would "just work", which is what Apple is supposed to be so good at...

I have a 60GB 5G with every single track on it tagged with album art, and I've had no problems whatsoever. It may be that I add all my album art through iTunes manually. I've found that the automatic art loaders generally leave a lot to be desired.

Thing is... this happens with tracks that I manually added album art for that iArt never touched. So I ruled it out as the culprit. Plus, I got iTunes to rewrite the tags for every track thinking that IF that was the issue... then iTunes would tidy it up.

Hrmmm. That is strange.

I do know that iTunes prefers album art to be on the smaller side. I generally use PNG images as close to 200 x 200 as possible.

If you want, I can try to work with one of the files you're having trouble with and see if it has the same behavior on my iPod.

Thanks for the offer, but unless you want to DL over 10GB of tunes you won't see the issue. As mentioned, it doesn't start to happen until i've loaded up a huge chunk of songs.... say somewhere around 5GB

I'm thinking it's a size issue too... lots of the album art is from Amazon which are mostly ridiculously huge. Any idea how to mass shrink em?

Well, I just did it in Photoshop when necc. I generally just use Google Images to find the appropriate cover in the right size. I only have to resize on rare occasion. You could easily set up an automated workflow in Photoshop if you have access to it. If not, I think you could probably just use Automator if you have OSX.

EDIT: Yeah, I just played around with Automator a little. Just open it up and search for "scale images". Again, this assumes you're on a Mac (which for some reason I thought you were...)

but... here's a question. What is iTunes doing when it says "Optimizing album art for iPod" when you turn "show album art on iPod" on in the prefs? Isn't it shrinking them down?

I actually couldn't tell you. I've had the "Show Album Art" option active since day one, and I've never seen that message.

The best place I've found for album art is Rate Your Music: http://rateyourmusic.com/

I was able to find a ton of stuff on there that no Amazon site had content for (and I searched all the Amazon sites).

On a Mac you can use Automator to batch resize a bunch of images - it will call into iPhoto to do it I believe. Or as mentioned, Photoshop's "Batch" tool is fairly simple when coupled with an action adjusting the Image Size.

I have a hard enough time adjusting "normal" tags that I think I'd go boonkers trying to put album art into all my tunes. I used the site above just to get images into my CD catalog and that was already quite tedious.

Any great tagger programs for the Mac? Has to be as good as Dr.Tag and Tag&Rename for Windows (I use both of those via VNC now).

Bruno

Of course, iTunes serves as a fine tag editor. About the only features it's missing are any way to set the tag from the file name or vice versa. iTunes, however, can happily scan your files in place, without importing them anywhere, and let you edit the ID3 tags within.

You can also use any of the Unix tag editors, like kid3 (requiring you to install Apple's X server and probably a big chunk of KDE stuff from fink).

Okay, so I reformated again, and reloaded with the show album art option OFF. Once it was all loaded, I flipped it on, and it seems to be working fine now. The menus are a tiny bit sluggish at random times but at least everything plays without skipping.

Anyone looking for the fastest way to get album art on a PC, iArt is pretty much as good as I could find. Interface isn't beautiful but one you get it, it's fast and functional.

iTunes, like a number of other programs for all platforms, makes for a decent manual tag editor. it can do single and multiple files without a problem. However that's about where it ends.

Unfortunately it doesn't do anything for recognising directory structure on disk to aid in tagging, nor as you mentioned, filenames. So if you start with very few (or gasp, no) tags, you're pretty much SOL. You won't know what's what, and therefore have no hope in the world of manually tagging anything.

Dr.Tag is my number 1 over-all, but Tag&Rename's Amazon look-up feature is very slick and I've used it numerous times to lessen the amount of typing that needs to be done. I've paid for both of them and for a long time I had abandoned Tag&Rename (until I found the Amazon feature was useful). I'm really hoping for an update to Dr.Tag but I'm not holding my breath (they've been promising one for well over a year).

So I guess I just add that to my list of sorely missing applications for Mac OS. Right up there with a good text editor. Tthere are likely a dozen or more text editors for Mac OS X - they all suck. "Real bad." Give me TextPad, UltraEdit or emEditor (though I haven't used this one personally) any day.

Loren, good to know stuff is working for you now. Apple stuff does tend to work, but when it doesn't, it's usually something catastrophically important (for instance the main reason I don't use iPhoto is because it's a pain in the ass to simply "VIEW" images - and Preview really stinks for anything but single images).

Bruno

Loren,
Thanks for the tip on iArt. I'd been using a beta of 'album art' (or something like that - it was /.'d a while back) and it was pretty buggy. I let iArt chew through my collection last night and it reported an 83% success rate. I'll review its choices tonight, I'm sure a few are wrong, but I don't care all _that_ much.

-Zeke

As with any OS, Vim. Or, if you prefer, Emacs. Pretty much any other text editor is a waste of time.

I respect your incorrect opinion.

So you want a mouse-based text editor? I can't imagine what features any of those things could have that are not done better by Vim or Emacs.

I used to be a hard-core vi user (none of this vim crap), complete with elaborate vi macros that interfaced with external spell checkers or text formatters. I began to waver when I saw gdb-mode. Shortly thereafter, I saw the writing on the wall and switched to emacs (by which time, emacs wasn't as widely known as "emacs makes a computer slow" or "eight megabytes and constantly swapping"), and promptly had a month-long email exchange with the maintainer of viper-mode, which now does a passable job of immitating vi keybindings. (You can take the man out of vi, but you can't take the vi out of man.)

I haven't tried many of these PC editors, but I have played with many of the IDEs (PC and otherwise) that have come along. I like some of the autocomplete features (yes, you can do it in Emacs as well, but not as elegantly), as well as the drop-down help that's integrated with Javadoc. Did you forget the order of arguments to a method call? There it is, right below your cursor. That's pretty cool. Having your class hierarchy in a sidebar, allowing for quick browsing is also moderately useful.

Beyond that, I'm always striving for ways to avoid using my mouse. Keyboarding just seems more efficient.

Yeah, like Mark said, the GUI versions of both Vim and Emacs are as mouse-controllable as any other editor, from moving the cursor, to menus that do a variety of things, to file dialogs, etc. In fact, CLI Vim can be configured to use the mouse to at least move the cursor, if not other things, if it's in an xterm or some other compliant terminals. That probably applies to Emacs as well.

Of course, this raises the question of why you want to use the mouse to do that sort of stuff. It's way easier and faster to not use it.

Emacs's mouse cut+paste interface is vastly better than the standard windows one. For one, you don't have to use the keyboard. The scroll bars are also vastly better (assuming you compile with Athena-style scroll bars).

As for IDE features, at work we use Visual Studio. Autocomplete and parameter information are nice... when they work, which is about 50% of the time. Emacs (with etags) is better at jumping to definitions than Visual Studio is. It also indents code correctly (something no editor I've ever seen, including vim with :set ci, does half as well). So I use emacs in cygwin, and only use V. Studio to compile (and for its debugger, which is actually extremely good).

Do you have Konfabulator (now known as Ipod widgets)? If you use a program called Itunes Companion, it will download the album art for any song you are playing and transfer it to itunes automatically.....not sure how well it transfers to the ipod though since I don't have one....