A number of people have mentioned the problem of album art disappearing from MCE over time even though the art displays fine in WMP and much exacserbated with the latest upgrade to WMP11. One of the things that I noticed while researching the problem, was that art that I'd fixed with Album Art Fixer always seemed to be okay and it was only the stuff that WMP downloaded as I'd imported tracks into the library that developed issues.
Now I really, really, really didn't want to have to go through and redo my art for half my collection and that would be around 800 albums and would take just a little too much time just so it would show up in MCE.
So I thought, what would happened if I deleted the hidden AlbumArt_{blah_blah}_Large.jpg & AlbumArt_{blah_blah}_Small.jpg files and only left Folder.jpg and AlbumArtSmall.jpg files as these are copies of the above files also written by WMP (and the same as written by AAF).
So did a couple of tests on part of the broken collection (like nearly all my AC/DC albums were stuffed), and trashed AlbumArt_{blah_blah}_Large.jpg & AlbumArt_{blah_blah}_Small.jpg from each albums directory and I deleted desktop.ini as well for good measure.
Low and behold I got back all my covers in MCE and WMP covers are unaffected.
No need to process ay media chages in WMP or anything like that
Now my guess is that the blah_blah in the AlbumArt_{blah_blah}_Large.jpg & AlbumArt_{blah_blah}_Small.jpg files is some tag information that's being changed over time as MS changes media info/art providers. While WMP appearss smart enough to recognise that if the tag has changed or can't be validated to default to the Folder.jpg and AlbumArtSmall.jpg files for the artwork, MCE just gives up.
This fix assumes that you've organised your collection in a relatively nice way and at least
have each album in its own directory, if you've got multiple albums in a directory in probably won't work for your (unless you don't mind all albums having the same art).
To do the fix in bulk, run the following from a batch file or command window
attrib -r-s-h
<music drive/dir>\AlbumArt_{*.jpg /s
attrib -r-s-h
<music drive/dir>\desktop.ini /s
del
<music drive/dir>\AlbumArt_{*.jpg /s
del
<music drive/dir>\desktop.ini /s
Now for the black album art problem, do the above fix and also delete all album art from the tags in the media files using some sort of tag editor.
