Saturday, January 6, 2007
Zune Ugly Truth #2: Embedded Album Art Not Supported
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Zune Hardware" @ 12:00 PM
BACKGROUND: With its big, bright screen and display of CD cover art while playing a song, it seemed like the Zune was going to be the ultimate audio player for visually-oriented people like myself. Yet when the first Zune reviews were starting to trickle in, several of them made similar comments to this:
"Despite the larger screen, many album covers look worse than they do on the iPod." - Walt Mossberg
I couldn't figure out why the early reviewers were saying this, and quite honestly I chalked it up to them not knowing how album art was supposed to look. I sent a friend of mine (who had a pre-release Zune) an MP3 from an independent artist that had big, glorious 600 x 600 pixel embedded album art, and asked him to load it onto the Zune. He sent me a picture (which looked great) and I published a glowing article about how great it was that the Zune displayed embedded album art. It was especially noteworthy because the Toshiba Gigabeat S and other PMC devices did not display embedded album art. I was thrilled - until I bought my Zune and saw that, indeed, the quality of the cover art was horrible. What was going on? Why did I think the Zune displayed embedded album art?
"Despite the larger screen, many album covers look worse than they do on the iPod." - Walt Mossberg
I couldn't figure out why the early reviewers were saying this, and quite honestly I chalked it up to them not knowing how album art was supposed to look. I sent a friend of mine (who had a pre-release Zune) an MP3 from an independent artist that had big, glorious 600 x 600 pixel embedded album art, and asked him to load it onto the Zune. He sent me a picture (which looked great) and I published a glowing article about how great it was that the Zune displayed embedded album art. It was especially noteworthy because the Toshiba Gigabeat S and other PMC devices did not display embedded album art. I was thrilled - until I bought my Zune and saw that, indeed, the quality of the cover art was horrible. What was going on? Why did I think the Zune displayed embedded album art?
