Cayin album art
April 23, 2019 in bliss by Dan Gravell
This week we're taking a look at another portable hi-fi manufacturer: Cayin.
Cayin market their products to audiophiles. Like other devices in this market, the players have high quality DACs alongside large high-res displays from which you can choose and browse your music library. This is great, but it's very dependent on how well you have previously organised your library.
Album covers are important because it makes browsing and identifying music easier... plus they just look cool! Fixing missing album artwork is therefore an important part of library management.
The software on the Cayin player needs to know where to find the cover art that is in the library, and the images themselves need to be displayable by the device. Even if you've put effort into finding the artwork already, if it's not stored in the correct manner the Cayin won't show it.
The rules by which Cayin players find artwork are, unfortunately, undocumented. There are, however, numerous forums where their customers have posted their results in getting artwork working. I've managed to distill their findings to find the rules that should generally work for everyone. If you have any to add, please let me know in the comments below! The rules for artwork I found are:
- Embedded artwork is used in preference.
- Separate image files can also be saved with the same filename as the track, and these will be used on a per-track basis.
- Separate images for the album can be stored in a
cover.jpgorfolder.jpg - Artwork should be below 1000x1000 to avoid CPU spikes.
- JPEGs are supported, there are no references to other formats.
We can automate the fixing of our existing artwork, and find new artwork so it displays in Cayin players, and also encode and store the rules so future music also shows its artwork.
Step by step
First, download and install bliss. There are downloads for other platforms on our download page.
After installing, start bliss; the first page will allow you to locate your music files and configure bliss to fix album art:
Now, locate your music library in the albums section. Use the Browse button to find the folder in which your music is stored. You can even find the device directly if it's connected to the computer and the drive is mapped to a drive name (Windows) or mounted to a folder (macOS - look in /Volumes, or Linux).
Now we can configure the rules we listed above. First click the Find missing cover art button. This allows us to set the locations for cover art. Here we encode the rules above:
I've elected to save the image file in a separate cover file, this will mean cover.jpeg is the name of the resulting file.
Click Add rule; this just saves the rule, it won't apply it yet.
We also need to add an image format rule to allow just JPEGs. Click Add a rule > Image formats > Configure and then select the appropriate formats:
Finally we should also add a rule for the maximum resolution. Click Add a rule > Maximum resolution > Configure and then select the appropriate formats:
After you click Add rule you'll notice the Manual/Automatic switch. This configures bliss's behaviour when it sees artwork that is larger than 900x900. If you already have art and it's over 900x900, and you have this set to Automatic, bliss will shrink the artwork for you. Otherwise, you'll get a one-click fix to perform the shrinking manually.
Now our rule list is complete:
Click Apply rules to start bliss scanning for albums and fixing artwork.
Any album without a cover.jpeg or embedded art will have those filled. bliss uses, in order of preference, existing art (from cover.jpeg or embedded if they exist) or if there's no existing art, bliss performs a lookup and finds the artwork online, embedding it in the right places.
Any existing artwork which is not in the correct format or is too large will be identified. The size rules can be automated, but the image format rule will not be fixed automatically. We'll get a one-click fix for that later.
Any albums with non-compliant artwork are identified:
You can also make fixes in batch on the Inbox page.
One final step
Most devices need to be "rescanned" to re-read the updated music files and any newly added or fixed album art.
With the Cayin music player app shipped with the device, you can do this from the player itself by clicking: Application Menu icon (the settings cog at the top-left) > Music Scan.
I hope this helps fixing your album art for your Cayin device! If you have any more tips about organising your music library for these devices, please let us know in the comments (or send us an email).
