I know this is a perennial problem, so I thought I would share my experiences...
I have a 64GB SDXC card which has the contents of my iTunes Music folder on it. I've formatted it to FAT rather than EXFAT, using a utility called guiformat available here: Ridgecrop Consultants Ltd I did this before realising that the MMI does actually support EXFAT, so this might be irrelevant, although I've never had any problems with the card formatted this way.
Mostly, album art didn't show, except for a few times. The problem is that the MMI is very specific about image and file size limits. Album art can be no bigger than 500px x 500px and no larger than 200KB. It reads the art embedded in the files themselves, NOT art held within the album folder as folder.jpg etc as far as I can tell.
To consolidate all my art, I used Bliss from http://www.blisshq.com/mp3-tagging-software.html
You get 100 fixes for free but I knew I would need more, so you can buy 1000 fixes for £10 or unlimited for £30. I went for the £10 because they'll refund it against the £30 should you need to go to that many.
So, I opened Bliss and pointed it at my iTunes Music folder. I did back up both the library and the iTunes databases first, just in case, but there were no problems.
In the Cover Art section, I set:
'Saved Artwork Filename' to 'folder' (even though it's not relevant - this will create an art jpg for each album)
'Embed Art Where Possible'.
Minimum size = Medium (300x300)
Tick 'Replace with larger art automatically'
Maximum Size = Large (500 x 500)
Tick 'Shrink art automatically)
Maximum size = 128KB (this should be ideally 200KB, but there's no option - have emailed the developer)
In the Tag Types section I set:
ID3v1 = Ignore
ID3V2 = Require
Tick 'Change Tag Types Automatically' - this was just to clear out any old ID3v1 tags which don't support embedded art.
Then hit 'Apply Rules' and off it goes.
So, I had a LOT of work to do after this. Many files came up as non-compliant and required intervention on my part to decide how to deal with them - mostly this was choosing which of the available artwork options to use. Sometimes the artwork I wanted (and which was already in the file but non-compliant) wasn't an option, so I was saving the existing artwork, reducing it in size by compressing it a bit more and re-saving it.
After a few "happy" hours, I had a fully compliant library, which I copied over to the SD card and I now have full artwork on 450 albums on the MMI. The changes have made no visible difference to iTunes at all, that seems to deal with artwork itself in a different way.
Hope this is of some help!
I have a 64GB SDXC card which has the contents of my iTunes Music folder on it. I've formatted it to FAT rather than EXFAT, using a utility called guiformat available here: Ridgecrop Consultants Ltd I did this before realising that the MMI does actually support EXFAT, so this might be irrelevant, although I've never had any problems with the card formatted this way.
Mostly, album art didn't show, except for a few times. The problem is that the MMI is very specific about image and file size limits. Album art can be no bigger than 500px x 500px and no larger than 200KB. It reads the art embedded in the files themselves, NOT art held within the album folder as folder.jpg etc as far as I can tell.
To consolidate all my art, I used Bliss from http://www.blisshq.com/mp3-tagging-software.html
You get 100 fixes for free but I knew I would need more, so you can buy 1000 fixes for £10 or unlimited for £30. I went for the £10 because they'll refund it against the £30 should you need to go to that many.
So, I opened Bliss and pointed it at my iTunes Music folder. I did back up both the library and the iTunes databases first, just in case, but there were no problems.
In the Cover Art section, I set:
'Saved Artwork Filename' to 'folder' (even though it's not relevant - this will create an art jpg for each album)
'Embed Art Where Possible'.
Minimum size = Medium (300x300)
Tick 'Replace with larger art automatically'
Maximum Size = Large (500 x 500)
Tick 'Shrink art automatically)
Maximum size = 128KB (this should be ideally 200KB, but there's no option - have emailed the developer)
In the Tag Types section I set:
ID3v1 = Ignore
ID3V2 = Require
Tick 'Change Tag Types Automatically' - this was just to clear out any old ID3v1 tags which don't support embedded art.
Then hit 'Apply Rules' and off it goes.
So, I had a LOT of work to do after this. Many files came up as non-compliant and required intervention on my part to decide how to deal with them - mostly this was choosing which of the available artwork options to use. Sometimes the artwork I wanted (and which was already in the file but non-compliant) wasn't an option, so I was saving the existing artwork, reducing it in size by compressing it a bit more and re-saving it.
After a few "happy" hours, I had a fully compliant library, which I copied over to the SD card and I now have full artwork on 450 albums on the MMI. The changes have made no visible difference to iTunes at all, that seems to deal with artwork itself in a different way.
Hope this is of some help!
