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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Album Cover Art - Finally a Fix
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