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Where is album art stored on 645M?

With the Forerunner 645M, nothing is straightforward when it comes to music if you're on a mac, as I am. Because I have a large music collection--which is stored on a USB drive and all of which has been painstakingly tagged in iTunes, with album art that is sometimes embedded in the mp3/aac files and sometimes in ~/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork--Garmin Express chokes on it and won't allow me to sync anything to the watch.

Since macs cannot natively mount MTP volumes (which is how the watch presents itself when connected), I use a program called SyncMate to mount my watch on my desktop. Doing that I can see in the 'Forerunner 645 Music Media' folder a folder called Music (or maybe I put it there, I can't recall) and in it are folders with artists that I definitely put there and each artist folder has album folders which each contain tracks. So far so good. I'm able to transfer music manually in this way and the music plays from the watch.

That's all great, but I cannot figure out a way to get album art to show up on the watch. It doesn't seem to work when the art is embedded in the files and it doesn't work when there's a .jpg file of the art inside the folder.

So can someone tell me where cover art should be stored in Media folder? Mine looks like the attached. ciq.forums.garmin.com/.../1469379.jpg

0 bupkis over 6 years ago

Answering my own question (as I usually do) for the benefit of anyone with a similar question: album art should be embedded in the ID3 tags of the music files. It should be .jpg format (.png doesn't work) and it should probably be 800 x 800 pixels or smaller. This works with MP3 files. I haven't tried it with AAC files.

I don't even want to go into the 8 or so exchanges I had with Garmin support which were an exercise in utter futility just trying to get them to understand the question. This was the most generous of the responses I got:

The device has the ability to read and display the information regarding the Music file itself. Depending on where the file originates, this can vary. For example if the Playlist was downloaded via Spotify on Garmin Connect Mobile then the artwork will not be visible.

If the file has been transported onto the device via the PC, then it should be able to display Album artwork. As discussed previously, there is no way of telling which file contains the Artwork.

This is dependent on the Publishers of these Music files and how they embed the artwork into the file itself. This is not something we would not be amend and something that you may have difficulty doing.

Garmin after-sales support is utterly horrible. The 645M is my first Garmin running product and I have to say I am really disappointed with the support (of which I don't need much generally). Every answer from support is a semi-literate run-around with no real attempt even to understand the problem, let alone answer it. Garmin may be the market leader, but they are ripe for the picking with this sort of carry-on: if Polar or Suunto are paying attention, they have an opening.