Album Cover Art - Finally a Fix

[PeterPan]

newic
Glad it solved your long outstanding issue.

colb
Thanks for the feedback. As for your Xbox 360 and album art cache, not really sure how it works with the 360 as I don't have one. Anyone know where, how it works for the Xbox?? Or anyone willing to donate one to me so I can create a fix???

Cheers,

Pete.

[messus]

Peter Pan, you are a magician, thank you for this little great app that does great wonders! 

Still, I have some issues, maybe you or somebody can help.

I still need to have embedded jpg’s into the mp3 files because:

1. This make it possible to easily transfer my mp3’s to my portable music devices; currently a Samsung T9 Media player, and Nokia N95 Mobile phone. To be able to see the album art on these portable devices the jpg need to be of a maximum resolution of 200x200 pixels (The windows standard). I don’t know how it is on other mp3 players, e.g. ipods, but 200x200 should be more than sufficient for some time ahead on portable devices.

2. Having cover art embedded in mp3’s make the music collection transportable to another computer or system.

So the first thing I do is to embed album art (200x200 windows standard) into the mp3 files using Tag & Rename (which is a GREAT application) for tagging and embedding, and / or AV Soft Album Art Checker (Fantastic application checking that your albums in media player/ VMC are correct with Album ART etc.)
(http://www.avsoft.nl/cms/index.php?o...id=80&Itemid=4)
I then embed a high-res JPG into the respective folders which I rename to ”cover.jpg”. (And BTW you wrote that the maximum size was 500x500 for Vista, this is not the case, I have at least one JPG of 600x600 showing up just fine in VMC after using your application).

I have a very large collection of mp3’s, and before I go ahead and make all of them “ready”, I need to know that I have found a consistent approach to rebuild my collection for media player / media center when I reinstall the OS or buys a new computer (which we know will happen from time to time).

Now the strange thing is, when I now run your application, some albums/folders accept showing the high-res JPG (cover.jpg) in VMC, and some just don’t. (some are still using low-res cover art). - I can’t seem to find a logical explanation to why some don’t (still lookin).

I have tried to remove the embedded album art from the respective mp3 files, and then running your application with my high-res “cover.jpg”, and then the high-res album art is shown in VMC. If I after this embed the low-res (200x200) jpg’s into the id3v2 tag of the mp3 files the high-res image is still shown in VMC. But if I remove / delete the libraries with all data / high-res cache / wmdb, and rescan for albums in wmp and run your application again, then low-res jpg is used, regardless!!

Funny thing this only goes for some albums. For 50% of the albums high-res “cover.jpg” is showing up just fine in VMC even if the tracks have low-res (200x200) jpg pre-embedded..

I tried to add my “test-library” on a completely different Vista PC, just to check. Exact same albums are accepted / rejected with using high-res on this other Vista PC..

I know you have said earlier in this thread that embedded jpg’s in mp3 files will cause problems and that this embedded jpg somehow seem to be preferred.

Well it doesn’t seems so in all cases, and I need to figure out why some are accepted and some don’t!!

Also, I saw someone mentioning that low-res jpg’s are used in the album overview in VMC. I totally agree, this sucks, and I would also like VMC to use high res jpg’s here. It looks ridiculous using low-res jpg’s in this view on my 40” LCD screen. (It doesn’t even look as if they are 200x200, they look even worse!! Seems like they are compressed or downscaled or something!?)

Don’t know what Micro$oft were thinking about!

Anyway any help would be appreciated, and thank you for a great little app!!

[messus]

Peter Pan,

I figured out why some albums accept high-res album art in VMC and some albums don't.

It seems like when the files:

AlbumArt_{76334CB4-028F-4035-BF69-D5ACE9FDB2F4}_Large.jpg
AlbumArt_{76334CB4-028F-4035-BF69-D5ACE9FDB2F4}_Small.jpg

are in the respective album folder, VMC will not choose my high-res "cover.jpg" regardless if I run your application.

If I delete the two files above in the respective album folder, VMC uses the high-res "cover.jpg" !!

But now when I delete the library info/album cache etc.. and rescan with Windows Media Player, these two files pop up again in some folders / albums.
Why these two files pop up again when rescanning in only some folders / albums, and not all, remains a mystery for me. I would sure like to know how to prevent these from re-appearing when re-scanning so that I don't have to delete them all again.

the files I now have in the mp3 albums/folders are:

mp3 tracks...

folder.jpg (200x200)
cover.jpg (500x500 / high-res)
AlbumArtSmall.jpg

The process now is.

1. Rescan library on fresh PC / WMP
2. Run your application (in my case using "cover.jpg" as high-res)
3. Search for and delete all _small.jpg / _large.jpg BEFORE launching VMC!! (If not VMC will take use of the (200x200) _large.jpg file and you have to delete and rescan again)
4. Launch and use VMC with high-res album cover art

At least I know how to deal with it now, but it's cumbersome if I have to rebuild my huge library..

Hence, any ideas on why the two mentioned files above only show up in some folders/albums when rescanning with WMP would be appreciated.

[ajdisse]

Originally Posted by messus

I figured out why some albums accept high-res album art in VMC and some albums don't.

It seems like when the files:

AlbumArt_{76334CB4-028F-4035-BF69-D5ACE9FDB2F4}_Large.jpg
AlbumArt_{76334CB4-028F-4035-BF69-D5ACE9FDB2F4}_Small.jpg

are in the respective album folder, VMC will not choose my high-res "cover.jpg" regardless if I run your application.

If I delete the two files above in the respective album folder, VMC uses the high-res "cover.jpg" !!

But now when I delete the library info/album cache etc.. and rescan with Windows Media Player, these two files pop up again in some folders / albums.
Why these two files pop up again when rescanning in only some folders / albums, and not all, remains a mystery for me. I would sure like to know how to prevent these from re-appearing when re-scanning so that I don't have to delete them all again.

I'm pretty certain windows media player is repsonsible for that one. Under one of the option tabs within Media player is a setting "Update my media files by retrieving missing data from the Internet". (or some such - I'm not near a vista PC at the moment!)

Turn this off, and you'll not get the album art downloaded.

The reason it only appears sometimes is that it relies on a match to album name (or artist/title/etc) info. If it gets a match, then it downlaods the art if it has it.

So if your tags aren't a good match, or Microsoft don't have the album art in their library, you won't get the cover downloaded.

[ILLINI77]

i have tons of pics that are art cache that i want to delete. can you please help me? thank you.

[messus]

Originally Posted by ajdisse

I'm pretty certain windows media player is repsonsible for that one. Under one of the option tabs within Media player is a setting "Update my media files by retrieving missing data from the Internet". (or some such - I'm not near a vista PC at the moment!)

Turn this off, and you'll not get the album art downloaded.

The reason it only appears sometimes is that it relies on a match to album name (or artist/title/etc) info. If it gets a match, then it downlaods the art if it has it.

So if your tags aren't a good match, or Microsoft don't have the album art in their library, you won't get the cover downloaded.

The option for WMP to download missing information automatically is always turned off on my system, also in VMC, so this is not the reason!

[chris_m]

Hi,

I upgraded my Vista Business package to Ultimate yesterday especially for Windows Media Center and was amazingly dissapointed about the album art and poorness of quality.

I've used to tool to part success but i'm now rather stuff.

All my covers are stored in the album directory and are called 'cover.jpg'
I downloaded media monkey to clear all the existing album art, and then used your tool and the log reported success for most of the files.

On opening Windows Media Center it seems to have worked on a couple of albums, but others not. All the folders are fomatted the same and all coverart the same too. I've tried time and time again, but no luck, and the log says that the process is successful too. Any suggestions?

Thanks

[npsmith79]

Hi PeterPan,

First off - thank you for an excellent fix to what was probably the most annoying thing I've encountered with Vista Media Centre in my short experience with it (I graduated to a new HTPC laptop - and couldnt be bothered jumping through the MythTV hoops again).

I can vouch that I followed the instructions (as indicated in the first post - as well as the helpful tip(s) to remove ALL files other than the hi-res cover from each of the Album dirs).

One request I do have however would be for a way to run 'incremental' updates i.e. only copy over files - say for new albums - which dont exist in the destination cache directory. I have what is probably a medium size library (10,000+ songs) - and I'm impatient - so if possible when adding a new album it would be nice to be able to skip all the files I've previously copied over - and get straight to fixing up the new album, rather than waiting the hour or so it takes to run through a full sweep.

I foolishly tried a combination of settings in v1.3 which I thought may give me the desired outcome (dont overwrite + ignore errors) - however all this resulted in was spending the first 1 minute manually saying cancel to the copy window until such time as my impatience kicked in and a "Kill -9" was sent the way of the offending app!

Anyway - to make a "very useful tool" into an "extremely kick-butt tool" - I think this would be a valuable addition.

Thanks

[Paganini]

Originally Posted by chris_m

Hi,

I upgraded my Vista Business package to Ultimate yesterday especially for Windows Media Center and was amazingly dissapointed about the album art and poorness of quality.

I've used to tool to part success but i'm now rather stuff.

All my covers are stored in the album directory and are called 'cover.jpg'
I downloaded media monkey to clear all the existing album art, and then used your tool and the log reported success for most of the files.

On opening Windows Media Center it seems to have worked on a couple of albums, but others not. All the folders are fomatted the same and all coverart the same too. I've tried time and time again, but no luck, and the log says that the process is successful too. Any suggestions?

Thanks

I've got a way how to fix some random non-working albums. Here's how I did it, pretty simple:

Delete the non-working album from the library & computer, re-copy or re-download it, whatever, then allow some times for the WMP library to update the newly copied files. (best is to restart)

Go to Windows Media Player, choose the album that you've just copied, select all of the songs in that album, click Advanced Tag Editor, re-enter only 3 information about the album, (genre, album & artist), delete all of the other info in the track info & artist info tabs, the point here is to make things simple & make sure that all of the tracks in that album have the same basic info.

Now create the high-res cover art, place it in the album folder, you should re-paste that high-res cover art to the album in Vista WMP Library FIRST, then apply the fix and open MC while leaving the WMP Library running so it will update the info faster. You should now have the high-res cover art.

If the name cover.jpg still doesn't work for that cover art. Try other names (mycdcover.jpg ; cdalbumcoverart.jpg , whatever...)

Again, this fix rocks, thx PeterPan! My Vista MC is truly high-def from now on!

EDIT: If some album still not working this way, delete the album again and follow messus' method in page 4.

[Dogbomb]

Originally Posted by 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.

Greetings From London Peter Pan and my Aussie Cuzzes

Big thanks to Peter Pan you are a LEGEND! you saved me from doing some serious damage to my VMC from frustration. Spent days scanning all my album art with a Fujitsu fi-5220C scanner, scans were great but after i saw them in VMC i nearly cried and had to restrain myself from pressing the RED BUTTON :-D P.S. if u havent already got one of those scanners, id think about investing in one, its got the best twain driver options ive seen, no need to edit the images afterwards ;-)

Nehows... ur app certainly gave me a huge improvement, but i have a 60 Inch tv and im wondering is there any way i can get higher res than 500x500 ? as it still looks a little pixelated on the 60 inch screen :'( reckon i need 700x700 or 800x800 to make it fine.

PS. i have a large collection of Trance & House album art if anybody diggs

Thx in advance ur reply

Dogbomb :-D

[be1hov1]

Hi

Thanks for his great fix, it really rocks. Just want to kow if you have to run it each time you add a new album from now on?

/Be1hov1

[McoreD]

Hi PeterPan,

Great finding put into code. I am interested in tinkering it a bit too, could I please have access to the source? My email address is mcored@ii.net.

Thanks,
McoreD