2017 Impreza - playing media music files conundrum

[jrfk2]

Hi Folks,
I have the cd player that came with my 2017 Impreza and it plays music files from "media" .. I rip my music CDs and put them on a USB drive.
For most of the music files when they play, the screen displays a default green "music notes" icon .. but for some of the files it displays the album cover that song was ripped from.
I cannot figure out why some music files show the album files and why some do not .. I thought maybe it might be because some were ripped as WMAs and the ones that display the album cover were ripped as MP3s .. but I just ripped 3 new CDs as MP3s and the album covers do not display with the songs ..
Was wondering if anyone else knows about this or what the solution might be ...?
thanks ..

 

[jrfk2]

So I finally figured this out .. first off the ripped files have to be MP3s, not WMAs.

Secondly the app you use to rip the files has to know about the album art when its ripping the files. I used Windows Media Player and unfortunately it did not find very many album art to include in the MP3s.

So I found some free s/w called "Creevity Mp3 Cover Downloader" which will allow you to add album art, file by file. It will search for art for you or allow you to use one you downloaded yourself (it can;t always find album art).

And if you already have a lot of WMAs (as I did to save space initially), another free program called "Format Factory" will bulk convert WMAs to MP3s for you, if you don't want to re-rip them from the CDs.