fact being that they charge prices in excess of .99 cents per track, it should be a given that apple includes the album cover art with every track that they sell. this however is not the case. this is a little short entry but its going to save you a lot of time and pain especially if you’re not used to the way pirate devices work. now there are a few ways you can get music onto your surfans mp3 player if you believed me and purchased one at my behest. there’s the illegal way with dirty, questionably mastered tracks, or there’s the simple way dealing with itunes and quboz for .FLAC because both of those clients are drm free and the tracks come with their meta’s filled out ready to scrape. however i also recommend music bee. music bee is fine for the dude who has under 1000 or so tracks on his digital audio player and wants a high quality picture to improve the presentation for him, that extra visual flec, yah know. i mean you paid for it legally, you’re entitled to that. now, it’ll probably vary for you but, since the surfans mp3 players function as external drives with very little os to get in the way when you attach them to your pc, you fire up music bee, configure it to the music folder in the corresponding section on your windows installation and all the tracks saved to your p.c. will show up in the interface when you press the synchronize button as long as the name of the folder in the music section of your p.c. matches the folder that you might have to create on your dap, on surfans, which is what i’m working with right now, little to no hassle aside from the F20 being the more polished product for the moment despite having weaker specs than the F28. (actually, if you roll with the original firmware, the booting issues diminish noticeably, but that’s just for me and for the moment. that makes me want the F35, but that is a bonified cheap DAC, whatever that means to you as a struggling dj.) full transparency, i’m saying leave the firmware at the default, or revert it if you’re like me and you know enough, but you have no idea what an .upt extension file is and how to apply it to your device… understood? and just know that the internet, microsoft included is not particularly forthcoming with this information. so from there it’s just a matter of going from empty album box to empty album box, and right clicking “find album art on the internet.” see here’s where the legal aspect of a client’s meta information being correctly filled out as a condition of your purchase effectively reduces the amount of salt that in a decent amount of cases goes along with embedding art in stolen music, besides… firstly i’ve been using my phone as my media player for like the last decade so i’m kind of aced out of the game as far as knowledge of quality goes but understand this. your private personal enjoyment of your downloaded music is dependent on a trinity of factors with one that is new to me, but just because of my belief in the DAC. so it’s going to be 1. the quality of your digital audio player 2. the quality of your headphones and 3. the fidelity of the track your listening to. in the era of ai, i consulted chatGPT and microsoft copilot for suggestions. so, as i was saying, your going to right click that find album art on the internet subheading on the blank square album cover and it should provide you with a few choices. click the one you want, click “embed art in the track,” or something like that, rinse and repeat until all your albums have cover art. the cool thing about the surfans dap players in spite of the infuriating quirkiness of the F28 sku as the player they act like they didn’t want to make is that when your done you find your legal apple music installment in the music subheading of your file explorer on your p.c. and simply drag and drop copy the entire apple installation into the drive and it should place all that beautiful album art for you even on that 2 inch F20 screen, the p.c. copies it when you drag and drop, you don’t want to move it. if run into small issues with having to format the micro sd card or change the name of a folder, but nothing crazy. then all you have to do is turn on “show album art” in the device settings. now i realize that this is a completely chinese dap player and with congress being unable to turn on the lights for a straight month recently, part of the problem or not i should be trying to support quality american products sourced and assembled by quality american engineers… but where do i get that? not even purchasing from sony or apple because they both outsource. living on a prayer, looking for a path, is it all the same?
