Jason Stewart

I just spent the last couple hours trying to figure out why some of my music's album work wouldn't show up in my NTG 4.7 COMAND head unit display; I figured it out and thought I'd share the knowledge in case anyone else runs into this issue.

My kids listen to Adventures in Odyssey (kids radio dramas) and we have many CDs, too many to fit into the 6-disc changer in my '13 GL 550. The car came with a few onboard media storage options, such as a built-in hard drive, AMI port and memory card slot. I ripped all the Odyssey CDs to iTunes (now just "Music" on an Apple computer) and then transferred the tracks to a memory card to play in the car. Initially, I ran into two problems:

1. Hidden Files. Apple computers put a bunch of hidden files on any external media / drive connected to your computer (like "._some-file"); normally devices would just ignore them, but the NTG 4.7 system does not, which meant it would try to play them and skip over them before getting to the actual media. Annoying, especially when you have a couple hundred blank files to skip over before you get to the stuff you want.
2. No Album Artwork. Despite having embedded album artwork in each of the media files (MP3s) only some, not all, of tracks would actually show the album artwork in the NTG system's display.

To address #1, there are methods to delete these hidden files. The free OSX utility "CleanMyDrive2" does the trick. Clean the drive after you put the files on it, then eject and no more annoying skipping hidden files in your NTG 4.7 head unit.

To address #2, turns out that NTG 4.7 can only read album artwork embedded in MP3s if they are 500x500 pixels or less. I found this out via trial and error. You'll need to edit the album artwork embedded in the MP3s to less than 500x500 pixels (I used the built in "Preview" app on my computer to do this) and then re-embed them in the MP3 (can be done via apple "Music" app, or a free alternative like Tag Editor Free).

I hope this saves someone the headache of trying to figure this out themselves in the future!

Mr. Toad

Interesting. My standard album artwork image file is 700x700 pixels and COMAND displays them just fine when I play music from my MP3 library on a USB stick in the console. I have about 3,000 MP3s on that drive, all with embedded 700x700 pixel artwork.

Jason Stewart

Ah yes! So the plot thickens... Maybe 700x700 is the limit then? Not sure. When I had super high-resolution album artwork, like 1280x1280, I couldn't get it to display. Perhaps it's more about the size of the image? Warrants some further investigations...

Mr. Toad

I agree that the limitation might be the actual file size, rather than the dimensions. All of mine are JPEGs.