I advise you to delete all the image files in those folders. And also, using Windows Explorer, display the hidden & system files, and delete all the files named BBThumbs.dat .
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I know, we all do.
Look, I will explain you in a few sentences, you can then ask for more if you want to do the right thing, ok?
so, when you have an mp3 file, it contains:
- the song, encoded using the MPEG1, Layer III encoder.
- a lot of file metadata, like owner, date of creation, date of modification, name of the physical file
- attributes (read only and so on)
- ID3TAGs : those will contain among other :
- the title of the song
- the artist
- the title of the album
- the number of titles in the album
- the number of that specific title along the title list
- the album cover (= art cover)
- a freeform text (= comment)
so when someone creates an mp3 file, they will provide all that, and some fields may of course be empty.
Those ID3TAGs, are of course standardized. You have several standards. You have :
- ID3TAG v1
- ID3TAG v2 (extended from v2, especially the length of each field)
- Apple iTunes format
- other formats that I am not aware of.
Now, what happens is this:
when the person rips an audio CD into mp3 files, the CD reader has a way to identify the CD, and fetch all regular info like artist, song name, album and so on. The album cover is not always part of those regular info.
so you often end up having mp3 files that contain ID3TAGs entirely filled except the art covert.
so will you ask, why do you see the art cover when you play the music ?
well, it's easy. Several popular music players, like Apple iTunes or Windows Media Player, are aware of what I have stated (ie the ID3tag often does not contain the art cover). So those programmes have a setting, that can be chosen by you, that will when you play the songs, fetch the art cover on the internet, and display it. This album cover is usually not stored in the ID3tags of the mp3 file by those players.
You do realize that it is not efficient to go fetch the art cover everytime you play a song. So those softwares do two things:
- they store the album cover on your harddisk, it is materialized by an image file that is stored in the folder containing the mp3 file. I have never understood those manners, that I find particularly impolite / rude / self-aware.
- they store the album cover in their own database, that belongs to them only (It is a neat way proceeding in my opinion)
so in the end, you have the same mp3 as before : got name, artist, album, but not the art cover inside the mp3 file.
And then you copy all that to another disk (= your PlayBook), and the music player of the PlayBook tries to do whatever it can with whatever art cover is in the ID3TAG (in your case, none), and with whatever art cover it finds in the folder (= the images I have been asking you to delete).
Et voilà, you have the explanation of the strange behaviours you have told us about.
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So what is my solution ?
use a software that will be able to add the cover art inside the ID3tag of each music file
You can do that manually. Take a software that enables you to edit the ID3tags of your songs, add the cover, and save. It will modify your mp3 file to add the cover art.
I do that using SongBird, which is a music player based on the Mozilla technologies used in Mozilla Firefox. VLC Music player does a great job too.
There are other softwares like "Tag&Rename", but I do not have other names to give you.
Some people use Apple iTunes. It requires a lot of knowledge to master its options, and in the end, you can end up storing the art cover in the Apple iTunes format, which is nearly like the ID3TAG, but the cover art cannot be seen by a non-iTunes music player.
*****
Got questions?
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