Buckle up, kids! Time for a tech how-to based on the trouble I had this week with the music app I have on my phone.
I have used Musicolet for years now and I love the app, once I can get it set up properly.
Hubby and I have a giant collection of compact discs (also called CDs for those who came along after CDs lost out to online music platforms). We like to be able to play those CDs (which we have digitized) through our phones because you really can’t beat the portability of digital music. Thousands of songs on a device not much bigger than a CD case. But, you need a player to play them.
Musicolet is ad-free and it doesn’t need access to the internet to work. It is customizable, so you can fiddle around with setting things up the way you like, including shuffling and creating playlists.
The one issue I’ve had with Musicolet is getting the album art to load. I remember this being an issue the first time I set up Musicolet years ago. Recently, my SD card, where I store my music files, stopped working properly and I needed to buy a new one. That meant reloading all of my music from the files I had saved to my external hard drive.
Once again, the album art would not load for most of the albums. I’m a visual person and it drives me bonkers to see the gray-music-note-inside-a-white-triangle-inside-a- gray-circle that is the default album cover in Musicolet.
I couldn’t remember how the art loaded the first time I used the app. It seemed to eventually load on its own.
Other than for a few albums, it was not loading on its own this time, so I searched online for a solution. Strangely, there’s nothing in the Musicolet help menu to walk people through this process, which I found to be rather complex, thus this blog post.
The first thing I did was download another app because I couldn’t figure out how to change the album art manually in Musicolet.
The app is called Album / Cover Art Finder. This helped me to find cover art for many of my albums. As I’m discussing Musicolet here, I won’t explain how this app works, but it has ads and if you are manually adding one album cover at a time in it, you’ll get an ad after every other album.
While I was fiddling with this app, I left a 2-star review on the Musicolet app and let the developer, Krosbits, know how frustrated I was in trying to figure out how to load album art. Someone from Krosbits got back to me almost immediately and started helping me troubleshoot. For that quick assistance and my love of the app once it has album art, I changed my review to 5 stars and updated my comments.
Eventually, after hours of trying different things on Musicolet, I figured out how to manually change the album art. Here is the process using Gwen Stefani’s album “Love. Angel. Music. Baby”. The instructions are in the photo captions.
I didn’t have album art on my phone, so I started out by searching for album art online. Musicolet will take you to Google with the search for the album already started for you.
The best place to find album art is Wikipedia, which will often display a fair use copy of album art for most of the well-known artists and albums. The art you need is 300 x 300 pixels, so very small, and the Wikipedia versions are this size.
Select the art you need and download it to your phone. Then, navigate back to the Musicolet screen above and select the art from your phone.
After exhausting my search for album art online, I photographed CD covers with my phone and loaded them onto my computer so I could resize them to 300 x 300 pixels using the Paint app. Then I moved those small versions into each album’s folder (matching the cover with the album) and copied them back onto my phone. The Musicolet developer said I could put each image in with its album folder or put them all in one album art folder to select from. I figured it would be better to put the art with the album so they wouldn’t get separated.
Is this fussy work? You betcha! But, for me, it’s worth it to have those album covers in my music player.
Once you’ve got the cover art saved to your phone, navigate back to the screen that allows you to select the art.
Hopefully, this guide will help you avoid the frustration I experienced while getting the album art back into Musicolet. If you have a lot of music and need to photograph your album covers, it’ll take some time, but at least you’ll be making progress.
And, in the process, you may rediscover music you had forgotten you liked. I’m enjoying getting reacquainted with “Love. Angel. Music. Baby.”