Can someone please explain to me how Vista handles album art

BGH · **7th June 2007, 10:31 AM**

Back in the glory days of XP Media Centre (after which this site was named) album art was so simple. All I had was a folder.jpg in each album's folder. XPMCE picked this up fine displayed high res album art for all albums without a single hiccup.

When I tried to do the same for VMCE the display of album art was very inconsistant. Using only the folder.jpg meant that VMCE would only display album art for the first song of an album. Occasionally it would display it for a song that wasn't track one.

Reluctantly I decided I would go and embed the album art in all the tracks. I used the high res folder.jpg as the source to embed in each mp3 file.

Now VMCE displays all album art fine, but it has created an albumartsmall.jpg file in every folder, even though I have all the "download info the net" settings turned off. Is there any way to prevent VMCE from creating this file? Is this the file it uses for the album art because the album art looks lower res in MCE than it did in XP.

Why oh why did Microsoft have to change the way album art was handled? It worked fine in XPMCE.

supafly · **7th June 2007, 10:36 AM**

im quite curious about this myself

Riles · **7th June 2007, 01:35 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by BGH

Now VMCE displays all album art fine, but it has created an albumartsmall.jpg file in every folder, even though I have all the "download info the net" settings turned off.

I am pretty sure that this jpeg file is a cached image. Basically when media centre scans for music it will find what it thinks is an album.. Then it will determine what the album art is for that album, and extract the image that is embedded in the mp3 file to a standalone jpg file. This gives a massive speed increase, as when you are in the album viewer mode, MC can scan its library and quickly display images for each album.

This is only my take on things from observation, i am not 100% on this...

Media Player does that same thing, after you add an album to media player, there is some hidden files, one for a full size image and on small i think.

I just had a look in my music folders. You need to have explorer show hidden operating system files, not just hidden files. There is:

AlbumArtSmall.jpg, 75x75 pixels (This is used for the album browser in both VMC and Media Player )
Folder.jpg, 200x200 pixels (This is for the large display)

I have found that you do not need to add the folder images manually. i used iTunes to do my album art... I just selected an album's tracks in iTunes, googled the name of the album and dragged the image over. Then Importing into Media it picked up all of the images, and it looks pretty good now...

Hope this helps..

instrotech · **7th June 2007, 08:24 PM**

Riles, I think you will find that not adding the art to each track will cause no art to be displayed during the playback of some of those tracks. I found all sorts of things going on until I embedded the art into all files.

Have a look at this thread, and the format I use as mentioned, allows me a headache free and perfect library. I stuff around with things a lot, and therefore found this method - possibly an overkill - works every time.

Album art media player vs media center discrepencies?
Riles - try changing the folder art for an album folder. VMC keeps a little database were it insists the correct art should be noted, and so it just keeps the original art no matter what.
Believe me this nearly sent me round the bend until I got it all sorted out....

What do you think?

Harlequin · **9th June 2007, 03:18 AM**

The order that Vista MCE selects its Albumart follows this priority:

1st: Embedded Art - If you used iTunes or the like to tag it the pic is actually IN the mp3.
2nd: AlbumArt added to the folder by Media player (normally called AlbumArt.jpg and AlbumArtSmall.jpg or something like that)
3rd: Cached AmlbumArt in the Media Player Database.
4th: File in the folder called FOLDER.JPG
5th: Nothing at all.

If you are not seeing what you want then look for items further up the list than your designated choice. They are the likely culprits.

...ps: took me a while to figure out that for some of my badly tagged albums I actually had to strip the AlbumArt OUT of the MP3 to get rid of it... Drove me nuts...

...pps: I've also noticed that if the MP3 is badly tagged then WMP will think it's the wrong Album/Track and download new copies of the incorrect AlbumArt everytime it checks/updates the database...

BGH · **11th June 2007, 01:12 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by Harlequin

The order that Vista MCE selects its Albumart follows this priority:

1st: Embedded Art - If you used iTunes or the like to tag it the pic is actually IN the mp3.
2nd: AlbumArt added to the folder by Media player (normally called AlbumArt.jpg and AlbumArtSmall.jpg or something like that)
3rd: Cached AmlbumArt in the Media Player Database.
4th: File in the folder called FOLDER.JPG
5th: Nothing at all.

If you are not seeing what you want then look for items further up the list than your designated choice. They are the likely culprits.

...ps: took me a while to figure out that for some of my badly tagged albums I actually had to strip the AlbumArt OUT of the MP3 to get rid of it... Drove me nuts...

...pps: I've also noticed that if the MP3 is badly tagged then WMP will think it's the wrong Album/Track and download new copies of the incorrect AlbumArt everytime it checks/updates the database...

I don't think this is entirely the case. For starters I would love it if #4 in your example was the case. Originally this is all I had but VMCE wasn't showing it properly. So then I changed to #1, ie I embedded all my album art in the files. So now all my mp3's have hi-res 500x500 embeded album art but VMCE doesnt use this either, it's displaying a low res album art on screen. My only explanation is that when it is creating the library it is creating a lowres version of the embeded albumart and called albumartsmall.jpg. This is the one it is using to display.

All I want is for VMCE to use either of the highres album art that is currently stored as the embeded album art in each file and also as a folder.jpg file in each folder. Currently VMCE is ignoring both of these and using the lowres albumartsmall.jpg it has created.