My "My Music" was a mess. After consolidating a gigabyte here and a gigabyte there from other machines in the house into My Music, ripping some new CD's, and repartitioning drives and changing the overall underlying directory structure of My Music, I had missing cover art, duplicate songs/albums, and unuseful names for some album collections and tracks, as well as generic art for albums that couldn't be found any longer since their locations had moved.
Clearly the time to sort it out had arrived.
So, armed with a keyboard, a fully charged mouse, and the AlbumArt Fixer program from
here (great program) I set out to improve it.
First, clear the database completely. I always try to work
within the programs that use files rather than just deleting databases, since you never know the dependencies of one file on another.
To clear the music database:
1) Go to My Music within MCE, press the "
I/Info" button on your remote and select Add Music. Select Remove Folders and clear the check marks from any directories you have set, and confirm that these folders are to be removed. This doesn't delete anything, it just stops MCE from trying to discover anything while we do the following steps.. You will note that all the albums
still appear after you have done this.
2) Open up Windows Media Play (WMP) and select Library. You will get a list of all media in the left hand pane. Select Albums from All Music and all of the album and tracks will appear in the big right hand pane.
Click in the right hand pane, press Control-A on your keyboard to select everything in the right hand pane , then right click and select Remove from Library. You will get a dialog box asking if you just want to remove the stuff from the library database or remove it from your computer.
Select remove from Library (because we don't want to actually delete the music) and also check the box "Don't ask again" otherwise you'll get the dialog box on every album. If your collection is large, this can take some time, so watch some TV in MCE while this is happening. There shouldn't be any conflicts since we have already effectively disabled new music discovery in Step 1.
After this is done, if you check My Music within MCE you will see that there is no music content, which is what we want at this stage.
Add the music content back.
1) Add all you media content back. In my case I had all my content back under a single directory so in WMV find the
green + Add To Library button and select the
directory(s) to import into the database. This can take some time. Note, even though it is obvious after you find the
+ Add to Library, I had a trouble finding it the first time through...it is on the bottom of WMP's window.
2) Go into MCE | My Music and renable Music Discovery. Press the
I/Info button on your remote and select Add Music. Add the folders you added to WMV so anything new you add in the future gets picked up.
3) You will see that under Albums, all the names are there but just as a simple list rather than as album covers. We'll fix this in a bit.
Fix the Album Cover Art:
1) Start the Album Art Fixer program. It will "know" where the content is and give you an album list. Follow the instructions on the web page and/or in the program to get new art and fix other problems such as out of sequence tracks, etc. I won't repeat those instructions here.
One thing you might like to consider is using Bella's tip (further down in this thread) about using the cover art from "
Cover Target, the 3td options under "Search". These pics are much higher in quality and show up really good when displayed on tv. Unfortunately, the choice is not so extensive as what you get under "google"".
As Bella notes, some of the "google" covert art is a bit unclear/fuzzy. Choose whatever looks best on your rig. You can always change it later.
A tip not explicitly stated in the program is that when saving the image it obtains from the Web to your desktop, you can reuse the same filename for the image over and over since it gets copied to where it will ultimately live after you confirm the selections. After you are done, you can delete the desktop image(s).
I tend to stick with 200x200 pixel images. If you want to change one after it has been fixed later, just click on the current image displayed in the program and grab a different image from the web or elsewhere.
Turn on Cover Icons within MCE:
This had me stumped for a while until I read another web page about how to turn it back on. After clearing the database and even fixing some cover art on a few albums all I got within MCE | My Music was the same boring text list of albums...no pictures!
This fix for this, with Albums selected in MCE, right click with your mouse over the Albums "button" and you will be given some options, the important one of which is "Display Album Covers" (or words to that effect). Select that and you will finally get the album art displayed within MCE.
Note, if you have MCE running while doing the Art fixer program, you can end up with Unknown Artist and the generic icon being displayed within MCE | My Music. If you try to actually play it MCE will tell you it can't find it. This is fine. Just exit My Music and reenter to pickup the new art within MCE.
I am not sure I am much the wiser as far as how all this stuff works, especially as far as the custom tags you can add to stuff within WMP, but if you are going to bite the bullet and finally clean up your musical mess as I did, I hope this gets you started.
Regards, Oz
