Album Cover Art - Finally a Fix

[PeterPan]

Ok,

So Album Art in VMC has been a bit of a black art and a general pain in the butt.

The Problem & Attempted Resolution Options
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If you previously used MCE2005 and had all your albums sorted by folder with a good old folder.jpg of the album in the directory, this no longer worked in VMC, only the 1st track would show the cover and the rest would have an image of a musical symbol.

You may have tried using one of the many great mp3 tagger or "album art fixers" out there to embed your jpg into the music files only to find that VMC would end up making it's own thumbnails at a paltry 200x200 in size (looks horrible on my 50" Plasma); and like me you may not even like the idea of bloating your mp3's with high res images.

Another option you could try so as not to embed the mp3's with the jpgs is to go into the Library of Windows Media Player and drag and drop your jpg onto the album, this results in all your tracks having the cover art without embedding, but alas the images are again scaled down to 200x200.

The Fix!!!!!!
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After reading many threads and tinkering around I finally found a way to have all my tracks have high res images. I had originally done it manually and it was very cumbersome and hence I did not share it with the community. 3 days ago my O/S HDD failed and I had to rebuild my HTPC (never fear, all my media is on a RAID 5 arrary). All my hard work on my covers was gone; so today I spend the better part of it building an automated Album Art Fixer app.

How it works
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As many of you may be aware, VMC creates a cache of the thumbnails in the following dir:

C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player\Art Cache\LocalMLS

It is here where VMC saves the max 200x200 images. Each image is saved in there with a name such as {2EBE5C7B-D1DA-4918-A23D-453318D03A22}.jpg. That name is a unique identifier (GUID) that windows creates. I figured that the WMP library must have in its database that same identifier as well as the path to the mp3; after much searching and polishing up on my VB skills I managed to interrogate the WMP Library database and found that my assumptions were correct.

Armed with that information I set out to build an app that queries the WMP library, gets the GUID & file path\name and then makes a copy of the folder.jpg (or whatever standard name you have chosen) in the same directory as the mp3 and copies it with the new GUID name to the C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player\Art Cache\LocalMLS directory.

Built my app and low and behold it works a treat!!!!!!

See attached zip file for the application itself if anyone else may find this useful as well as a screen shot.

Let me know if this requires further explanation (bit late here right now and I am probably rambling), also happy to hand out the VB code if anyone wants to tinker with it any further.

Cheers,

Pete.

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VMC Album Art Fixer 1.5 Released , download from here
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[Joni_78]

THANK YOU!

I was just rebuilding my library when I saw your post. Finally I get album art on all tracks with high resolution .

[hveijk]

[Circuit]

Great idea, I don't suppose youre interested in doing a similar app for DVD gallery ?

It has identifiers for each DVD and downloads each cover from the great internet each time.
You can have a folder.jpg in dvd directory but need to alter the xmlcache file individually.

I have no coding skills at all so its out of my league.

[rockstar71]

Nice app! Very helpful. I would be interested in tinkering with it a bit. Could I get the source from you? Thanks!

-Scott

[ozhound]

Ive never had this problem, i just use media monkey and pick a high res image to imbed into the mp3 file. the auto-tag option is quick, easy and pretty thorough if you are dealing with complete albums.

[PeterPan]

All,

Glad others are finding this useful, it has been one of my bugbears for a long time.

rockstar71,

Send me a PM with your email address and I will fire off the code to you.

Circuit,

Never really done much with the DVD Library, every DVD I have ever put in gets a cover from the net. I could certainly give it a crack, feel free to start another thread and describe in detail the problem and how you would see the resolution working and I will give it a crack.

ozhound,

Glad to hear that you haven't had the problem ... are you sure though that your album covers are showing in high res???

Cheers,

Pete.

[sialivi]

PeterPan,

Some suggestions:
1) Not all my albums have coverart yet, so popping up a dialogbox for each file not found is a bad idea if there's not a "yes to all" option or a setting to supress the dialogs
2) There need to be a cancel button. When all the missing files dialogs started popping up I realized this was going to take more time than I had but the only way to abort was to kill the application through the task manager
3) The interface is a bit unclear: "Default Image Name" is the name of the source file, right? Not the destination file? Having an overwrite checkbox next to it kind of gives the impression that the file you've entered into the textbox is the one that will be overwritten, which it isn't, right?

[PeterPan]

Hi sialivi,

Yep, agree with all your suggestions. The was whacked together in a couple of hours and there is definately room for improvement. I will include your suggestions and post an update in the next couple of days.

Cheers,

Pete.

[PeterPan]

Have tinkered a bit more with my little app to make it a little bit more user friendly.

Updates to VMC Album Art Fixer 1.1

ChangeLog
* Added logging
* Added ToolTips to explain what all the options do
* Added About button and link to this forum
* Added error ignoring options as per sialivi request
* Reorganized interface as per sialivi suggestion

Cheers,

Pete.

[CuFk]

Hi!

Is there anyone who can help me out with a "step-by-step" guide? I don't really get how to software works... Am I supposed to put the hi-res image in each album folder? Which option should I choose in the drop down box, folder.jpg or folder.jpg (500x500)?

An explanation (step-by-step guide) could help me out, just so I do it right the first time.

Thanks guys!

[Fez]

Your a champion!!!

This annoyed the bejezus out of me for so long in Vista. Now we have a fix...

Points coming your way.