I have a BUNCH of old MP3 players now. I take my favorite 120 songs and put them on all of them and use them. I finally got tired of only having about 20 of them show their album art and the others didn’t. I decided to figure out how to fix it. Here is what I found – by doing this, it made almost every one of the album arts show on my various MP3 players from Sony, Samsung, Sandisk/Sansa, Rockbox, Coby, Ruizu, etc.

Here’s how to do it:

I used a tool called Kid3: https://kid3.kde.org to view and edit the MP3 tags. First, I looked at the MP3 files that had album art but weren’t showing. I found that for many, if I changed the text encoding of the album art to ISO-8859-1 (most were set to UTF-16), then those started displaying. Next, the id3 v2 format must be ID2V2.3.0. NOT HIGHER – many of mine were ID2V2.4.0. Once I changed them to ID2V2.3.0, those started showing. I also made sure the images were 300×300 – though I didn’t do a lot of experimentation with that. By doing these 3 things, almost every one of them now show album art on all my players. There are a few that don’t properly read the artist/track/album info, but I haven’t dug into that. Here are my results…

For these, art and all metadata displays correctly:

• Coby MP837
• Ruizu D50
• Ruizu X02
• Samsung YP-S3
• Sandisk Clip Sport
• Sansa E350 (Rockbox)
• Sansa Fuze+ (Rockbox)
• Sony NXZ-A17
• Sony NWZ-E354

For these, art displays but other metadata doesn’t:

• Samsung YP-P2
• Sony NWZ-S615F

Give this a try and see if this fixes things if you are having trouble displaying album art!

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I’ve been on a kick lately buying bulk lots of MP3 players and reviving/updating/upgrading them. Keeps me busy, keeps them out of landfills, and is fun for me. Recently I got a bulk lot that had numerous Creative Zens: two Micro, one Touch, and one Vision:M. It was a major PITA to get these working so I wanted to document this for myself and others. I archived all the files on github – see brianpipa/CreativeZen.

First, big thanks to Reddit user jenrenefefe whose complete Creative Zen update guide was instrumental in helping me do this. I also archived it on github as a PDF, just to be safe.

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OVERALL

You will need Windows 98. I followed the instructions in the guide to download a Windows 98 ISO. My only laptop is Linux Mint and I didn’t want to try dual booting it and I tried VirtualBox on it but I couldn’t get it to work. So, I bit the bullet and spent $23 on an old laptop to put Windows on. This is now my “old tech” laptop. I installed Windows 10 Home and VirtualBox, and setup VirtualBox with Windows 98. Follow the info in the guide. This was not easy. The laptop came with no OS on it, and I had to jump through all kinds of hoops to install Windows on it… but I eventually got it done.

I’m not going to go through the software/firmware/drivers – the guide goes through that – I’m just going to go over the hardware I used to upgrade the drives.

Continue reading →

I picked these two up from ebay and both were in Japanese and have no option to change languages. Did some research and figured out how to switch them to English. Despite them not being listed on https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SonyNWDestTool the tool does work. Watch this youtube video (different model, but the concept is the same) and follow the instructions on the SonyNWDestTool page. Once you run the command and safely eject, reset the settings.
To reset the settings on either one the steps/menus are the same:

1. From the Main screen – choose toolbox in the bottom left
2. push up once to get to the bottom of the list and choose that (Common Settings)
3. push up twice then choose that (Reset/Format)
4. Choose what is selected (Reset All Settings)
5. Press left once to select Yes

and now the interface should be in English!