The Music app heavily re-compresses cover art resulting in low quality images, any workarounds?

Probably the most obvious disappointment with the native Music app is for whatever decidedly awful reason it downscales and heavily recompresses cover art, resulting in low quality cover art and compression artifacts. For high PPI screens it's highly noticeable when in the Now Playing/Fullscreen view and a it's real shame. It does something similar for Contact photos as well but I discovered a workaround in that case.

On my Passport have tested with 1440x1440px (native) resolution JPEGs, PNGs with the file extension renamed to .jpg, embedded and non-embedded cover art, smaller resolutions (eg: 1000x1000px) and each time the app continues to downscale and heavily compress the cover art.

Is there any way around this? Would love if Blackberry could release a small app update to fix this behavior, such a relatively small thing would make such an apparent difference.

Here are some cropped examples (the left 'Original' images were captured from the Photos app on the device itself):



Full size screenshot 1 (in Music app)
Full size screenshot 2 (cover art opened in Photo app)

Full size screenshot 2 (in Music app)
Full size screenshot 2 (cover art opened in Photo app)

Time to try Neutron ;-).

Posted via CB10

Or if you don't want to pay, give Blackplayer a try on Google play store, an Android application which works very nicely together with bb10 devices

Posted via my BlueBerry

I've seen Neutron before but if I'm honest the UI is rather an eye sore, no offense to those who love and use it :) It's unfortunate that various native Blackberry apps have certain issues that were strangely overlooked in development, which I've been coming across in daily use.

Blackplayer I've also seen recommended though from the description it contains ads. I've actually found it quite difficult finding apps that both lack ads *and* questionable privacy policies (read: overreaching data collection) on the Android store. Even some of the paid apps I've seen are the same which makes me shake my head. A considerable amount of BB10 apps I've seen are more up front with their revenue models, permissions and up-front paid version options at least.