Help With Cover Art Display

NMJToolbox · January 28, 2023

Hi All, I have just replaced my 2009 RX with a 2017 RX450h Luxury with premium navigation (LEXUSPREMIUMNAVIGATIONV2 MM15). I'm still working my way around some of the settings but one thing that is really baffling me is the display of cover art when playing MP3s from the USB. All of the MP3s have embedded cover art within the IDv2 tag. All are 500x500 pixels, all are jpg format. However, the car refuses to show the cover art I have embedded. The car shows some generic art which appears to correspond to the genre (eg pop, rock etc).

I have even extracted all of the covers to the relevant mp3 folder and named them folder.jpg - still no joy. I have tried turning Gracenote covers on and off but it make no difference at all - I still get the generic genre covers.

Anyone have any ideas?

PDM · January 28, 2023

2 hours ago, NMJToolbox said:

Hi All, I have just replaced my 2009 RX with a 2017 RX450h Luxury with premium navigation (LEXUSPREMIUMNAVIGATIONV2 MM15). I'm still working my way around some of the settings but one thing that is really baffling me is the display of cover art when playing MP3s from the USB. All of the MP3s have embedded cover art within the IDv2 tag. All are 500x500 pixels, all are jpg format. However, the car refuses to show the cover art I have embedded. The car shows some generic art which appears to correspond to the genre (eg pop, rock etc).

I have even extracted all of the covers to the relevant mp3 folder and named them folder.jpg - still no joy. I have tried turning Gracenote covers on and off but it make no difference at all - I still get the generic genre covers.

Anyone have any ideas?

The art needs to be embedded in each mp3 file (so folder.jpg will not help). Also, MM15 has quite a small restriction in cover art size. Try with 150x150 pixels. You may be able to get away with more (this is what I use on our MM13 in the NX).

I use software called bliss to embed the cover art and resize to 500x500 for MM19 systems and 150x150 for MM13. Guess you might try 300x300 for MM15?

Turn gracenote off to force it to use the embedded art.

Don't worry - it will work and does work totally reliably once we find the correct combination of settings.

Paul

NMJToolbox · January 28, 2023

41 minutes ago, PDM said:

The art needs to be embedded in each mp3 file (so folder.jpg will not help). Also, MM15 has quite a small restriction in cover art size. Try with 150x150 pixels. You may be able to get away with more (this is what I use on our MM13 in the NX).

I use software called bliss to embed the cover art and resize to 500x500 for MM19 systems and 150x150 for MM13. Guess you might try 300x300 for MM15?

Turn gracenote off to force it to use the embedded art.

Don't worry - it will work and does work totally reliably once we find the correct combination of settings.

Paul

Cheers Paul, all of the MP3s have the covers embedded, the folder.jpg in each folder was just another thing I tried (without luck). I use MP3tag (as it is free) so I will change a few of the images to different resolutions and see how it goes.

BTW, Gracenote is off - but it makes no difference anyway to what it displays.

I will give it a test now and return shortly!

EDIT:

Well, I am now completely flummoxed. I am a software engineer so I'm used to methodically trying combinations to see why things are not working as they should. Here is what I did.....

I took 1 album (Alphaville - Forever Young) and resized each of the images to different sizes (so I could see what resolution failed) going from 100x100 to 500x500 in 50px steps.

Track 1 - 100x100

Track 2 - 150x150 etc....

ALL of the images displayed however an odd thing happened when I got to 400px the image was terrible (I suspect it showed the gracenote image rather than my image).

Checking all of the other albums I was seeing cover art for most of the albums I tried but I consistently got the crappy default/genre image on all albums that had 'Various' or 'Various Artists' in the Album artist tag field.

Some of my single artist albums did not show the genre cover nor my album art cover that was embedded, it simply showed a photo of the artist (2 Gary Numan albums and a Faithless album).

So, I conclude that it can show 500x500px images. Cover art will not show from the album if it is a various album and randomly it shows some gracenote images (even though Gracenote images are OFF) but the criteria for this is unknown.

Testing will continue but I appreciate any other input from anyone!

PDM · January 28, 2023

1 hour ago, NMJToolbox said:

Cheers Paul, all of the MP3s have the covers embedded, the folder.jpg in each folder was just another thing I tried (without luck). I use MP3tag (as it is free) so I will change a few of the images to different resolutions and see how it goes.

BTW, Gracenote is off - but it makes no difference anyway to what it displays.

I will give it a test now and return shortly!

EDIT:

Well, I am now completely flummoxed. I am a software engineer so I'm used to methodically trying combinations to see why things are not working as they should. Here is what I did.....

I took 1 album (Alphaville - Forever Young) and resized each of the images to different sizes (so I could see what resolution failed) going from 100x100 to 500x500 in 50px steps.

Track 1 - 100x100

Track 2 - 150x150 etc....

ALL of the images displayed however an odd thing happened when I got to 400px the image was terrible (I suspect it showed the gracenote image rather than my image).

Checking all of the other albums I was seeing cover art for most of the albums I tried but I consistently got the crappy default/genre image on all albums that had 'Various' or 'Various Artists' in the Album artist tag field.

Some of my single artist albums did not show the genre cover nor my album art cover that was embedded, it simply showed a photo of the artist (2 Gary Numan albums and a Faithless album).

So, I conclude that it can show 500x500px images. Cover art will not show from the album if it is a various album and randomly it shows some gracenote images (even though Gracenote images are OFF) but the criteria for this is unknown.

Testing will continue but I appreciate any other input from anyone!

Ahhhh...one more thing. There is also a file size limit... Not just a pixel limit. It may be some of your 500x500 are under the file size limit and some are not?

One more possible caveat. In MM17 and MM19 albums are concurrently grouped by MP3 tag name and artist name... And all must match. So if you have an album with different artists on different songs, MM19 will see these as different albums! This does not happen on MM13 bit I haven't spent long enough with an MM15 to comment.

Paul

NMJToolbox · January 28, 2023

13 minutes ago, PDM said:

Ahhhh...one more thing. There is also a file size limit... Not just a pixel limit. It may be some of your 500x500 are under the file size limit and some are not?

One more possible caveat. In MM17 and MM19 albums are concurrently grouped by MP3 tag name and artist name... And all must match. So if you have an album with different artists on different songs, MM19 will see these as different albums! This does not happen on MM13 bit I haven't spent long enough with an MM15 to comment.

Paul

Just done some more testing. It certainly seems to have a mind of it's own. It is not a filesize limit, all of the images embedded are well under 100KB. The Delays (58K) displays, Faithless (54K) shows an image of the band, not the embedded cover. I have to admit I'm rather OCD about my tags and all are correct and match on the Artist and Album Artist names.

I can't see any reason why some will display and some will not when they are pretty much exactly the same tag wise. I did notice the display come up with a 'download failed' message when I was playing, no idea what it was trying to download. Another Weird one is that Madonna Celebration album does not display the embedded cover art or anything, I just get the USB logo - which I never had before.

I guess I will just have to put it down to 'well, it works.....sometimes'.

Here is an image of the gracenote covers off/no priority (I can't find any other gracenote setting). The artist image in both screenshots are not the ones in the tag or anywhere on the USB drive so it is definitely putting it's own gracenote image there for some reason.

PDM · January 28, 2023

15 minutes ago, NMJToolbox said:

Just done some more testing. It certainly seems to have a mind of it's own. It is not a filesize limit, all of the images embedded are well under 100KB. The Delays (58K) displays, Faithless (54K) shows an image of the band, not the embedded cover. I have to admit I'm rather OCD about my tags and all are correct and match on the Artist and Album Artist names.

I can't see any reason why some will display and some will not when they are pretty much exactly the same tag wise. I did notice the display come up with a 'download failed' message when I was playing, no idea what it was trying to download. Another Weird one is that Madonna Celebration album does not display the embedded cover art or anything, I just get the USB logo - which I never had before.

I guess I will just have to put it down to 'well, it works.....sometimes'.

Here is an image of the gracenote covers off/no priority (I can't find any other gracenote setting). The artist image in both screenshots are not the ones in the tag or anywhere on the USB drive so it is definitely putting it's own gracenote image there for some reason.

Have you checked on Lexus tech if you have the latest reversion of the multimedia software installed?

Paul

PDM · January 28, 2023

Just now, PDM said:

Have you checked on Lexus tech if you have the latest reversion of the multimedia software installed?

Paul

The bug and feature changes are also listed on Lexus tech.for each revision.

NMJToolbox · January 28, 2023

I checked lexus online updates and it said there was no updates available for my car..... maybe I am not going to the right place. I know the maps are the stock maps when the car was new as they are from 2016.

PDM · January 28, 2023

Just now, NMJToolbox said:

I checked lexus online updates and it said there was no updates available for my car..... maybe I am not going to the right place. I know the maps are the stock maps when the car was new as they are from 2016.

https://www.lexus-tech.eu

PDM · January 28, 2023

1 minute ago, NMJToolbox said:

I checked lexus online updates and it said there was no updates available for my car..... maybe I am not going to the right place. I know the maps are the stock maps when the car was new as they are from 2016.

You need to create a use account and can search for technical service bulletins (under the repair menu) for RX450h and look for MM15 updates. They are often called "running change X".

You will need a subscription to actually do the download but you can buy 1h access for very little.

NMJToolbox · January 28, 2023

Thanks Paul, found where I needed to go but nothing there I'm afraid. I even searched all bulletins for my car, there were 3 in total but nothing to do with the media system.

Rabbers · January 28, 2023

My music library consisting of CDs was originally synced complete with cover art to iTunes on my MacBook in the normal way and thence to my Iphone and iPod for playing in the car. The cover art always initially appears on the infotainment display even with Gracenote enabled, which is fine by me, especially as I can thereby get to “rediscover” the cover of an album I haven’t played for many years. What I find strange, however, is that when music restarts after having been interrupted when the hybrid system was switched off, it it is then accompanied by a Gracenote image and not by the cover art as before. Again, this is fine by me insofar as it provides a bit of variety, albeit unsolicited, but does anyone have an explanation for why it should happen?

Las Palmas · January 28, 2023

I use the CD/DVD player to store around 20 hours of m4a files on in 512kbps (close in sound to most people to the quality of a CD music disc) far better than 320kbps but of course take up more space as well. If you use a DVD with MP3 files on, I suppose you can have more than 30 hours of music on one 4.7Gb DVD.

Do not know what Bluetooth version is in your car, but the very old version in the CT transfer music no better to the excellent ML audio Lexus is giving us in the cars than medium quality MP3, and why they do not have software that can read lossless flac files is not for me to understand.

m4a files on disc is not as good quality as line-in from a music player, but having wires laying around is not really funny, so I take the next best solution I can find using the DVD player.

Picture of artist, name of tune, artist, album is displayed on the screen just perfect.

NMJToolbox · January 29, 2023

I just want to say, thanks so much to Paul (PDM) for all his help, we got there in the end. So, for reference on an MM15 system here are the things to ensure to get embedded cover art to display correctly and not display the crap from Gracenote:

Max resolution (MM13): 150x150

Max resolution (MM15): 300x300

Max resolution (MM19): 500x500

Ensure there is only ONE ID3 tag in the file - ID3 v2.3 (UTF16) worked fine for me (I removed all the ID3 v1 tags)

Cover type set to 'Front Cover'.

PDM · January 29, 2023

22 hours ago, Rabbers said:

My music library consisting of CDs was originally synced complete with cover art to iTunes on my MacBook in the normal way and thence to my iPhone and iPod for playing in the car. The cover art always initially appears on the infotainment display even with Gracenote enabled, which is fine by me, especially as I can thereby get to “rediscover” the cover of an album I haven’t played for many years. What I find strange, however, is that when music restarts after having been interrupted when the hybrid system was switched off, it it is then accompanied by a Gracenote image and not by the cover art as before. Again, this is fine by me insofar as it provides a bit of variety, albeit unsolicited, but does anyone have an explanation for why it should happen?

I suspect album art is loaded from the file only when the file is selected/starts to play. If you power cycle the car and then pick up the music mid way through a track, it does not read from the file and resorts to gracenote.

There is a minor bug in MM13 where if you power cycle the car and are playing music from usb, when you restart it resorts to folder mode rather than album mode, even if you were in album mode in the first place. There are several places where some test is not done at power up where it should be and it sounds like you have found another.

Paul

Rabbers · January 29, 2023

Thanks for the lucid explanation, Paul. As I said, the unheralded appearance of a Gracenote image in place of the original album artwork offers a bit of variety and, as such, the effect of this particular bug is not necessarily unwelcome.

NMJToolbox · February 8, 2023

Well, when I had this issue, I wrote to Lexus asking for their advice and they have just come back to me with the answer....

They obviously searched the internet and found this thread on the forum and sent me an email with my own reply above cut and pasted verbatim from this forum 🙂

Quote

Thank you for taking the time to reach out to us.

I would ensure the following resolutions for your multimedia system:

Max resolution (MM13): 150x150

Max resolution (MM15): 300x300

Ensure there is only ONE ID3 tag in the file - ID3 v2.3 (UTF16).

Cover type set to 'Front Cover'.

I hope this helps and thank you for contacting Lexus.

So Lexus support search the internet for answers on their own systems. It made me chuckle.

Rabbers · February 8, 2023

Love how the fashionable “reach[ing] out” of the opening paragraph morphed into simple “contacting” in the final one. Not to mention the shifts of person from “us” to “I” to “Lexus”. So although the contents are worth a chuckle, the style might itself be worth another.