Zumo XT music artwork

[Zumouser34]

I can’t seem to get the artwork on the SD card to display. If I Spotify from the phone it’s fine (but can’t browse music) but any mp3 saved on the nav doesn’t display artwork despite it appearing to be attached to the file. Can someone please tell me what Im doing wrong? The Garmin support site is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

[Zumouser34]

Figured it out. The album art ID3 tags of the music files should be .jpg format (.png doesn't work). It’s extremely long winded to change every song with an ID3 editor.

I have to say I’m not that impressed with the XT or Garmin in general. You’re better off asking your 90 year old gran than Garmin service support for anything, it’ll be a more useful anwser. The little ritual of connecting phone, headset and Zumo every time you go out on the bike. That fact you can only download 310mb of birdseye view at a time which unbelievably takes around 30 minutes. The clunkiness and general unfriendliness of Basecamp. Even sharing a route is not without problems. I shared a route and the travel time increased from 6m to 14 hours and no matter what we did, we couldn’t get it right. What we really need is a large, glove friendly IPX7 phone with Google maps. The XT is just painful to use.

[jfheath]

Figured it out. The album art ID3 tags of the music files should be .jpg format (.png doesn't work). It’s extremely long winded to change every song with an ID3 editor.

Well done for working it out, although I never had a problem. I transferred my music from folders that had previously been linked with Windows Media Player. The images went with the files and it just worked. I wasn't even trying to get them to show up.

I have to say I’m not that impressed with the XT or Garmin in general. You’re better off asking your 90 year old gran than Garmin service support for anything, it’ll be a more useful anwser.

I Disagree, although I don't have a 90 year old Gran to back up my opinion. It depends how you ask and how you respond. There is a triage system because they have to deal with people who haven't read the basic information - so their default position is to point you in the direction of the help pages. Followed by getting you to reset the device because often faults can be tracked back to something that the user has done or half completed. It usually takes 2 or 3 emails or conversations to get to the team that are deicated problem solvers. And they are very good.

The little ritual of connecting phone, headset and Zumo every time you go out on the bike.

Mine just connects. Sometimes it has a blip if I have been connecting other BT devices to my phone. But these go away if I leave the Zumo off until after I have moved away from the house and let them all find each other again. Sometimes I do have to break the connection on the Zumo and repair everything again - but only becasue I have been pairing the phone with other devices or pairing the XT with a different BT headset so that I can test things out at my desk. But I do prefer the wired connections that the 590/5 used to have. That really was plug and go.

That fact you can only download 310mb of birdseye view at a time which unbelievably takes around 30 minutes.

I downloaded some of that and couldn't be bothered with it. It is a lot of waiting for very little gain. But I couldn't see any circumstances where I might find it useful. If I want to see a 3d image of where I am, I think I'd probably just look around me !

The clunkiness and general unfriendliness of Basecamp. Even sharing a route is not without problems. I shared a route and the travel time increased from 6m to 14 hours and no matter what we did, we couldn’t get it right.

Basecamp is quite involved because it offers many more features than most mapping software - and the those features are suited to most of the later Zumos, including the XT. But it is only a case of getting used to it.

Now your problem of sharing a route is something that you will be able to get help with on here. It is easy. But if you share a route between two devices that are different, have different settings and different maps loaded, then you might experience some issues. It can also depend on how the original route was created and with which software.

But we would need to know what you are sharing and what devices you each have. Make another post in the same section eg Zumo XT - Sharing routes with a Zumo 123

Oh - and make sure that your software is up to date, and the latest maps are installed on your XT and on your computer. Use Garmin Express

What we really need is a large, glove friendly IPX7 phone with Google maps. The XT is just painful to use.

The XT is certainly a steep learning curve, but I recommend doing one thing at a time. Get a simple route working. We can help if you have the willingness to work with it. It sounds like you are trying to do too many things at once and none of them are working as you would like.

Can I ask - why did you buy an XT ?

[rbentnail]

Following. Especially the "why did you buy an XT?" part. I have successfully avoided getting an XT and other than a brighter screen nothing here on this forum has influenced me otherwise.

[Zumouser34]

The XT was a present (for which I am grateful, going on a 2k trip this year).

I agree, Birdseye is pretty pointless but my point was why does it take 30 minutes for 300mb? To be honest, I’m not gelling with it because it definitely is not intuitive and I’m sorry but Basecamp is just awful. Sometimes it accepts .KMZ sometimes not. It wouldn’t even import a .GPX file this morning and when I did eventually get it across it stuck a random waypoint in the middle of the Irish sea! It’s not my first Garmin either, had a 390 about 7 years ago and the only real and useful improvement I can see is Foursquare. The rest is pretty much the same. Think of what a 7 year old phone is like compared to now. It does look good but I think a lot of it is window dressing, plus it’s extremely time consuming to do something that takes minutes on a different platform.
Unfortunately I disagree with you on the usefulness of Garmin service support as well. I asked them how to get miles and Celsius (instead of miles & Fahrenheit) on a UK Zumo and response I got was..

“ Hi XXXXX,

Thank you for your email.
Please follow the next steps:

Units and time settings”

…and that was despite me mentioning there was nothing in Units and time settings to change this. I eventually figured it out with help from this forum.

So no, I’m not a fan.

[Zumouser34]

Just to add, I’m creating routes on Google my maps and then exporting as .KMZ which, as I said, is hit or miss whether Basecamp takes it. Nothing fancy with loads of waypoints, just A to B and dragging the route on the roads I want to travel.

[jfheath]

Well, I bought one nearly two years ago. There are things about it that I really like.

Other things - well I wonder why they have changed something that was broken. But its a machine. I'm not going to let a machine ruin my rides, so I write the reports to tech support and hope that they will get on with it. The rest I find a different way of working.

Have you spotted the viewtopic.php?t=1464 that I wrote ? I leave the really basic things to the owners manual and you will get pretty quick answers on here for those. Many of us are keen to help people with specific problems like that.

Sometimes answers to problem (eg like your KMZ issue) might require a different way of working, but it helps us to help you if you let us know what it is that you are trying to do. There may be other ways of achieving the same result. I was never a big fan of Basecamp, but it is the only tool that will do everything that you might want in order to prepare routes for the Zumos that have the trip planner App - from the 39x series, the 59x series and the XT. I have a liftetime membership to MRA and keep experimenting, but I still use Basecamp for what I need.


I am not a big fan of Google maps, but I have exported KML and KMZ files from a Google Maps route and imported both into Basecamp without any issues. The problem for me is that (unless I have missed something) the files are tracks rather than routes, and any intermediate points are not transferred with the finished track.

The XT is capable of navigating tracks, if that is what you want. In fact it has a three of different ways of doing it.
Otherwise you need to find some software which will do the conversion for you.

Basecamp will convert the track into a route, but it has only a start and an end point. It would be up to you to position additional points to keep direct the navigation that you want to ride. But if I was going to do that, I'd start from scratch (although it is handy to have the track displayed in order to create the route that you want.)

[Richard_R]

Figured it out. The album art ID3 tags of the music files should be .jpg format (.png doesn't work). It’s extremely long winded to change every song with an ID3 editor.

I used a program called Jaikoz to update the ID3 tags on the music I put on the XT (and for that matter on all the music I have stored on the NAS). Dead set simple. You just point Jaikoz at the directory and it does its thing. Essentially one click to update thousands of songs. When I do listen to music through the XT the album art shows quite nicely on the right side of the screen.

I have never used Basecamp, not once after years of hearing complaints about it. MRA does everything I want to do and it just works.

[Richard_R]

but my point was why does it take 30 minutes for 300mb? To be honest,

My assumption is that the processor inside the GPS is probbaly not overly powerful and it can only process the large amount of data that would be required fpr this slowly,

o

[jfheath]

I used a program called Jaikoz to update the ID3 tags on the music I put on the XT (and for that matter on all the music I have stored on the NAS). Dead set simple. You just point Jaikoz at the directory and it does its thing. Essentially one click to update thousands of songs. When I do listen to music through the XT the album art shows quite nicely on the right side of the screen.

Jaikoz ? Thanks, I'll seek that out.

I have never used Basecamp, not once after years of hearing complaints about it. MRA does everything I want to do and it just works.

I think that if I listened to all of the complaints about Basecamp, then I wouldn't use it either !

Mostly people like to complain without saying what it does wrong. The 'faults' that I have helped people with usually turn out to be operator error. It takes just a few minutes to understand the Basics.

MRA has made big improvements for Garmin users recently. Until very recently, it did not distinguishes between Via Points and Shaping Points that most Zumos use, and that made it a complete non starter for me. When I discovered that they now have the Via and Shaping points, and that they use the HERE maps used by Garmin, I bought a lifetime membership.

I still do not use it in place of Basecamp though !

Reasons?

* I need to spend more time working out the best way to do things. I'm not there yet.
* I have yet to find an 'Undo' facility,
* The last time that I checked a few weeks ago, the Garmin Waypoint/Favourites feature was not available, although POIs may fulfil the same purpose when they are finally implemented. I need to go back and check that.
* MRA does not send the actual route - the curvy line - that is drawn on the roads on the MRA screen. It sends just the route points and leaves the Zumo to calculate a route from that. However, it does produce a separate track and that can be used to mark the original planned route - and the track on the XT can be navigated.

But these are all irrelevant. What really matters is what you are comfortable with and whether it works for you.

MRA is now a pretty good alternative if you pay to get the Zumo compatible maps.