Album Cover Art - Finally a Fix

[PeterPan]

New release as per keyser soz's suggestion

VMC Album Art Fixer 1.2

* Added ini file to remember [Default Image Name]

Cheers,

Pete.

[sialivi]

I can't get this to work.

I've run the application and I've checked the Art Cache folder to confirm that the artwork has been copied there, but they still don't show up in Media Center for some reason.

Any ideas?

[PeterPan]

sialivi,

Are you on Vista or MCE2005? Last post I read you were on MCE2005 for which this app is not designed; MS significanly changed album art between MCE2005 and Vista.

If you are on Vista have you looked in the following folder:

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

What's there?

Cheers,

Pete.

[PeterPan]

Well found a little problem with my app when the WMP library grows quite large (I added our family pictures and my library grew to about 30,000+ items of which only 4,000 were songs) and VMC Album Art Fixer ground to a halt when counting. Further searching the WMP SDK led to me finding a more efficient way to count songs which I implemented in this update.

VMC Album Art Fixer 1.3

Changelog
*Fixed Audio Counting method, much quicker to count and copy on large librarys
*Fixed overwrite bug
*Added total number of songs and failed count to log file

Cheers,

Pete.

[sialivi]

Originally Posted by PeterPan

sialivi,

Are you on Vista or MCE2005? Last post I read you were on MCE2005 for which this app is not designed; MS significanly changed album art between MCE2005 and Vista.

If you are on Vista have you looked in the following folder:

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

What's there?

Cheers,

Pete.

I'm running Vista

The Art Cache\LocalMLS folder contains all the album art like expected but they still don't show up in VMC

I'm not 100% sure about this or if my eyes are playing tricks on me but:
When I enter the gallery, all the artwork is low quality
When selecting an album and get to the track listing, the small artwork at the top of the screen looks like it's high quality, and this is the only place I get better quality
When finally starting to play the music and display the large artwork, it's low quality again

[PeterPan]

sialivi

Have you by any chance embeded jpg's into the mp3?? I beleive the embeded art takes priority over folder.jpg hence why you might be getting lower quality artwork displaying.

I would also suggest deleting all the files in C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player\Art Cache\LocalMLS and running VMC Album Art Fixer again.

Let us know how you go.

Pete.

[sialivi]

No embedded artwork whatsoever, just CoverArt.jpg in the folders

I'll try deleting the files, even though they don't seems to be used at the moment, and see if I can get the albumart to disappear totally from VMC before readding them

[sialivi]

Before I run your program again I want to get rid of all artwork in VMC just to make it more obvious if it work or not, but I ran into some problem just getting rid of the artwork:

1) I started by deleting all files from the art cache, both in under media player and in ehome, result: most of the artwork dissappeared from the gallery, but not all
2) I examined the mp3's that still had covers to see if they had embedded images, but they didn't
3) I removed all music from the library, made sure that windows media player and media center were set to NOT download covers or info, and then re-added all the music, result: the albums that still had covers when deleting the art cache still had covers. Where the h*ll does those covers come from?!?!

[PeterPan]

So you are saying that you deleted files from both these directories:

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

And you are 100% sure there is NO embeded jpgs???

Other than the folder.jpgs in your music directories, there are no other places that I am aware of that cover art is stored.

Final thing I would do if all of the above has been done is delete all files with the extension ".wmdb" in the following dir:

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

They are the the databases WMP uses. WMP will rebuild them and I would then try adding just a few albums to WMP then running my app and see how you go.

Bizare ...

Good luck.

Pete.

[newic]

I would like to thank you for this great app ! I had tried to solve this problem for a long time and You did it ! Thanks Peter Pan !

[mcairns]

I use a program called tag & rename which embeds the cover art into the mp3.
It gets artwork from numerous sites that you can choose from, finds art for albums better than media monkey, seems to be higher res too... yes i am running Vista Ultimate.

Great thing about embedded artwork...I can copy just the mp3 to another windows pc, and I still have my artwork

Oh and btw...it is a great tag and rename product, that is stable on vista.

Just thought I'd share

[colb]

I've just used this app and it's brilliant. However, I also have an xbox 360 and some album art is missing should I remove the art from the 360 art cache?