I have just installed my new NEX6000 and have started to experiment with its features. I decided to test out the SD card slot using some albums I had ripped to MP3s. Each album is in its own folder and each folder has a file in it named "folder.jpg" which is a common method for ripping, but for some reason the art doesn't appear when I play songs in SD mode. The music plays fine and the tag info shows up on the screen fine as well. I called Pioneer tech support and of course they had no answer for me. All they could say is that the MP3s they got from iTunes were showing the album art when they played them from an SD card. Now the real kicker in all of this is if I hit the "Mixtrax" button then magically all of the album art appears as long as I stay in that mode. When I exit MixTrax mode the art vanishes again. The tech support rep was stumped by all of this. He simply took my info and said they would have to do some testing and get back to me. He wasn't even able to tell me for sure how to get album art to appear. He said that maybe it had to be embedded in the tag of each song, but was just guessing at that point. If so then that is incredibly stupid of Pioneer to do it that way since you would have to waste a ton of storage space to add the graphics to each and every song. Also, I'm not even sure how to get my ripper to add the art as a tag. I've never seen that as an option. I was just wondering if anyone has any insight on this topic since apparently the creator of the product does not. I have one week left to return the unit and this may be a deal breaker for me if I can't get it resolved.

Oh yeah, while I had him on the phone I asked about CarPlay and he said it was still slated for a summer release. Based on what I've seen from the AppRadio apps, I'm not too sure they'll be able to get that done right either. I predict those apps are going to be too restricted to be of any real use. I'm also really disappointed in the screen clarity on the HDMI mode. I don't understand how an HD interface can look that grainy on such a small screen, but it does.

The NEX units want the album art attached in the metadata for each file; it will not look in the folder for files with "jpg" extension if the metadata is not there.

Modern rippers add the album art as a tag -- if yours does not it's broken.  EAC (Exact Audio Copy) has done it for a very long time, and so do most others.  You can use something like "Mp3tag" to fix the files using the art file in the directory.

Very large album art will not scale and will simply be ignored.  I had a couple of albums with 1k-x-1k images (high-res covers) and they didn't come up despite being there.

600x600 and smaller appears to be ok; anything larger than 200x200 is likely more than the unit actually needs given the resolution available.

Thanks to everyone for your comments. The ripper I used this week for my new albums is called dbpoweramp which is apparently supposed to be one of (if not) the best so I don't think it is broken. I see no option in it for embedding the album art as a tag, but I will have to research it some more. My plan is to re-rip my entire CD library to a lossless format such as FLAC so I'm looking for a good ripper to do it once and do it right. The nice thing about dbpoweramp is that you can rip to multiple formats at one time with a single pass of the CD which saves a lot of time and it works perfectly. That is really nice in this case because I still want to have an MP3 format along with FLAC without having to do it twice or go through a conversion. It has been a few years since I did any ripping and I only used Windows Media Player back then to do all of it. Of course it did not embed the album art either so this is somewhat new to me. The EAC ripper was one of the others I was going to try so I will give it a whirl too and see how it works. In my opinion though, the unit should be smart enough to be able to pick up the JPG file especially since it already does it in MixTrax mode. The logical thing would be for it to first check for an embedded image in the tag and as a secondary check it could look for the JPG file since that is a very common method. In doing that, they would cover their bases and have it work either way. I'm actually a computer programmer myself so when I see software written in such a lazy, non-user friendly manner it just annoys me because I know how simple it would be to fix it. The MixTrax module was probably written by a different programmer and that's why it works better. The Pioneer tech support was pretty unimpressive and they have yet to return the call they promised I would get. To say they did not know how to get the album art to show up for sure is pretty pathetic. This is a not a new concept and has been something they've been doing for a long time. You might could understand some glitches like this on a $400 unit, but this is a $899 unit so you expect more.

Thanks to everyone for your comments. The ripper I used this week for my new albums is called dbpoweramp which is apparently supposed to be one of (if not) the best so I don't think it is broken. I see no option in it for embedding the album art as a tag, but I will have to research it some more. My plan is to re-rip my entire CD library to a lossless format such as FLAC so I'm looking for a good ripper to do it once and do it right. The nice thing about dbpoweramp is that you can rip to multiple formats at one time with a single pass of the CD which saves a lot of time and it works perfectly. That is really nice in this case because I still want to have an MP3 format along with FLAC without having to do it twice or go through a conversion. It has been a few years since I did any ripping and I only used Windows Media Player back then to do all of it. Of course it did not embed the album art either so this is somewhat new to me. The EAC ripper was one of the others I was going to try so I will give it a whirl too and see how it works. In my opinion though, the unit should be smart enough to be able to pick up the JPG file especially since it already does it in MixTrax mode. The logical thing would be for it to first check for an embedded image in the tag and as a secondary check it could look for the JPG file since that is a very common method. In doing that, they would cover their bases and have it work either way. I'm actually a computer programmer myself so when I see software written in such a lazy, non-user friendly manner it just annoys me because I know how simple it would be to fix it. The MixTrax module was probably written by a different programmer and that's why it works better. The Pioneer tech support was pretty unimpressive and they have yet to return the call they promised I would get. To say they did not know how to get the album art to show up for sure is pretty pathetic. This is a not a new concept and has been something they've been doing for a long time. You might could understand some glitches like this on a $400 unit, but this is a $899 unit so you expect more.

dbpoweramp is the one im using too. great piece of software. As others said: embedd the image/covers in the metadata when ripping (with dbpoweramp). Just remember to keep the resolution and filesize to a minimum. i have found out that res 300x300 and a filesize below 200KB is working 100%. I have had to re-arange my files on my sdcard due to different size limitation of the avic. using imgbatch for resizing and mp3tag for embedding and renaming. mp3tag is also a great app to customize your collection.

OK, I finally had time to dig a little deeper and have been able to resolve the issue thanks to all you guys. What I've found is that dbpoweramp was in fact putting in the album art as a tag in addition to creating the separate folder.jpg file. The problem was lust like tickerguy says where the images were too large so they were just being completely ignored. I then found a setting in the dbpoweramp software that allows you to set a max image size for which I selected 600x600. After changing the settings, I then re-ripped my albums and copied them back to my SD card. The album art then showed up correctly just like it should have all along. Again, I don't think I would have ever figured all of that out on my own so I really appreciate the tips. It's too bad that Pioneer doesn't publish that info in their manuals or web site and that their tech support doesn't know this either. Thank goodness we have forums like this to help each other out.

I just downloaded dbpoweramp for mac(beta). I was wondering what compression you guys were using. I set it to no compression, but the files are huge, say around 50 mb per song. Glad they are going to a 240gb ssd. I can't wait to hear them and the difference in the mp3 form and the flac. I need to check out the album art now to see what size image is being recorded.  Glad i read your posts, before ripping 400 cds.

I just downloaded dbpoweramp for mac(beta). I was wondering what compression you guys were using. I set it to no compression, but the files are huge, say around 50 mb per song. Glad they are going to a 240gb ssd. I can't wait to hear them and the difference in the mp3 form and the flac. I need to check out the album art now to see what size image is being recorded.  Glad i read your posts, before ripping 400 cds.

if you want lossless audio then flac lv5 is the default option (no compression and song size is everything from 30-50mb+)  no need for other. i myself only have a 32GB sdcard so i preffer mp3 lame with an VBR of "extreme/V0/320kbit