Windows Media Player 11's embedded album art

by **dypsis** » Tue May 07, 2013 5:56 am

It is quite simple.

Do not let WMP anywhere near your music library.
Do not point WMP at your music library.

by **Guest** » Mon May 06, 2013 4:22 pm

Guest wrote:I've got an even better (worse) story about WMP album art that I can share and ask for hints. Be advised that I have gotten through to a Microsoft WMP "expert" and he took over my desktop while I took him through the steps to watch the insanity. Needless to say ... my ticket is still open and I need to get back to him as he didn't give me the promised followup call.

Background ... I have a music media library with ~100K sngs all sorted by artist/album within a single location on a local drive (did this for performance as I used to have a network drive and this - i think - caused additional issues. My library consists of 70% downloaded material (my bad and 30% ripped from my CD library. After many years of labour and love I have created what can only be described as a very comprehensive library with "virtually" all the correct meta-data stored. As I got towards perfection I chose to shut down all automatic internet updates as these, I found, actually screwed up and put a lot of erroneous art and/or other information into the library.

A couple lessons first and then the ISSUE:
1 - Yes ... it appears that the album art is stored in the individual album directories with four hidden .jpg files

AlbumArt_{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}_Large.jpg
AlbumArt_{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}_Small.jpg
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
Folder.jpg

Note that the two long files usually have some obscure HEX code in them such as:

AlbumArt_{5BF555FF-2DC2-4A4A-B7E7-A0106351A5CF}_Large
AlbumArt_{5BF555FF-2DC2-4A4A-B7E7-A0106351A5CF}_Small

And also note the HEX code for small and large are the same.

Here is where it gets interesting ... it appears that when the proper art is located from the MSFT site fai.music.meteservices.microsoft.com and is used to store the info ... you will generally get the "coded" files. If you can't find the info and instead have to manually add the albun artwork by pasting it in ... the files stored in the directory have the first example with all numbers as zeros. I think this is a source of the issue ... though MSFT disagrees.

Here is where things go completely wrong ...

As previously stated, I had shut off all Internet updates so the "final" cleanup of my library involved a lot of semi-manual creation of the right directories (using the WMP edit function while inside the find album info dialogue box) and corrections/edits and even some made up "unknown album" in the case where I couldn't discern what disc the song came from. I would then find the appropriate album art on the web and paste into WMP. All GOOD!!! Except when I sometimes fire up WMP or sometimes after a reboot ... I find the album art missing ... or worse ... a completely different file (often one used recently to update some other album) showing up in multiple places associated with multiple songs and artists! What a freaking pain and caused me to call in the troops at MSFT. More strange ... and the tech saw it live and in technicolour! ... when you look in the directory of a album that you know is incorrect ... you see the four incorrect .jpg files. THEN if you do the simple, albeit time consuming and frustrating task of Find Album Information - Edit - (don't make any changes) - Save. BOOOOOOOOOM ... the art changes to what you had previously stored now displaying in WMP and magically changed within the file directory.

What this is telling me is that there are some strange links/references to some strange place ???? where the correct info is hidden. Black Magic perhaps but all I know is that it is frustrating as hell.

So please call MSFT if you have this issue and lets see if they can finally correct it in Windows 8 Or we all have to go to iTunes Which has its own issues as you likely know.

I am so desparate to solve this that I will even leave my mobile # to anyone who believes they have the answer. Perhaps I should offer a reward.

Sheepdog wrote:I am having this very same issue.

I have turned off the automatic update in WMP11.
I have run AlbumArtTagger to remove album art not matching my storage.
I open mediamonkey and the art is gone.
I close MM and reopen it and lo and behold it's back.
I have searched (checked show hidden files and folders) my hard drives for folder.jpg and albumart and can't locate anything yet these images keep showing up.

I want my images stored in the tag without folder.jpg

Any suggestions for me?

I am running Vista Home Premium and MM3

THIS IS THE EXACT SAME ISSUE I HAVE WASTED HOURS OF MY LIFE TRYING TO FIX!!! And i do believe you are correct; it is the string of zeros that is causing the problem. Everytime I think I have corrected the problem in each music file, it suddenly comes up again. And the image displays in every single player I sync. It is so frustrating, and I now HATE microsoft for this. I just want to strip each music file of the embedded media info and start afresh in Google player with no album art, and then delete MWP foreverrrrrrrr. Anyone know how to do this?

thanks.

by **...** » Thu Mar 01, 2012 9:19 pm

I am dealing with the sameish problem. I tracked down the corrupted file (it was a free download from an artist website, poorly encoded with reverb nation album art) and deleted it.

For quick play of a solo song I use WMP and that is about the only time I ever use it. Well that junky album art now was being displayed any time I was using WMP to play something from that folder. I cleared every cache I could find and did all the due diligence involved with any hidden files or out of the way/roundabout directories. I came across a rouge .mp3 sound test file I made that had no album art associated with it on my OS partition. There was no shitty album in WMP when I played the file.

Then it occurred to me that it may be a localized problem, perhaps to just the default folder I download to before files get sorted to their correct folder. I put the 9 stray audio files that were in my download folder in a freshly made folder and opened them in WMP and no more album art.

I always have my folders set up to show hidden and there is nothing of suspect anywhere on my computer. I have to assume this is a glitch with WPM reacting with some sort of corrupt file. I was able to fix the problem by creating a new folder and moving all the files to it, then deleting the old folder.

In my case this was my fix: (your case my be different)
1. Don't use WMP. If you do use it make sure all the setting are set to how you want them, and hope everything works for you.
2. Track down the corrupted file(s) (It pays to keep your files on your computer well organized)
3. Delete corrupted file(s)
4. Clear any cache data
5. Track down and delete any hidden files (you may not have any)
6. Create a new folder and copy a .mp3 for any other audio file that was affected.
7. Play file in WMP. (If there is no album art or the correct album art, this should be an easy fix)
8. Create a new folder and copy all the contents from the affected folder in to it.
9. Delete old corrupted folder.
10. Test audio files to make sure everything is cool.

by **Jhenna** » Fri Feb 10, 2012 11:27 pm

All GOOD!!! Except when I sometimes fire up WMP or sometimes after a reboot ... I find the album art missing ... or worse ... a completely different file (often one used recently to update some other album) showing up in multiple places associated with multiple songs and artists! What a freaking pain and caused me to call in the troops at MSFT.

by **Guest** » Tue Jan 24, 2012 10:17 am

I've got an even better (worse) story about WMP album art that I can share and ask for hints. Be advised that I have gotten through to a Microsoft WMP "expert" and he took over my desktop while I took him through the steps to watch the insanity. Needless to say ... my ticket is still open and I need to get back to him as he didn't give me the promised followup call.

Background ... I have a music media library with ~100K sngs all sorted by artist/album within a single location on a local drive (did this for performance as I used to have a network drive and this - i think - caused additional issues. My library consists of 70% downloaded material (my bad

and 30% ripped from my CD library. After many years of labour and love I have created what can only be described as a very comprehensive library with "virtually" all the correct meta-data stored. As I got towards perfection I chose to shut down all automatic internet updates as these, I found, actually screwed up and put a lot of erroneous art and/or other information into the library.

A couple lessons first and then the ISSUE:
1 - Yes ... it appears that the album art is stored in the individual album directories with four hidden .jpg files

AlbumArt_{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}_Large.jpg
AlbumArt_{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}_Small.jpg
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
Folder.jpg

Note that the two long files usually have some obscure HEX code in them such as:

AlbumArt_{5BF555FF-2DC2-4A4A-B7E7-A0106351A5CF}_Large
AlbumArt_{5BF555FF-2DC2-4A4A-B7E7-A0106351A5CF}_Small

And also note the HEX code for small and large are the same.

Here is where it gets interesting ... it appears that when the proper art is located from the MSFT site fai.music.meteservices.microsoft.com and is used to store the info ... you will generally get the "coded" files. If you can't find the info and instead have to manually add the albun artwork by pasting it in ... the files stored in the directory have the first example with all numbers as zeros. I think this is a source of the issue ... though MSFT disagrees.

Here is where things go completely wrong ...

As previously stated, I had shut off all Internet updates so the "final" cleanup of my library involved a lot of semi-manual creation of the right directories (using the WMP edit function while inside the find album info dialogue box) and corrections/edits and even some made up "unknown album" in the case where I couldn't discern what disc the song came from. I would then find the appropriate album art on the web and paste into WMP. All GOOD!!! Except when I sometimes fire up WMP or sometimes after a reboot ... I find the album art missing ... or worse ... a completely different file (often one used recently to update some other album) showing up in multiple places associated with multiple songs and artists! What a freaking pain and caused me to call in the troops at MSFT. More strange ... and the tech saw it live and in technicolour! ... when you look in the directory of a album that you know is incorrect ... you see the four incorrect .jpg files. THEN if you do the simple, albeit time consuming and frustrating task of Find Album Information - Edit - (don't make any changes) - Save. BOOOOOOOOOM ... the art changes to what you had previously stored now displaying in WMP and magically changed within the file directory.

What this is telling me is that there are some strange links/references to some strange place ???? where the correct info is hidden. Black Magic perhaps but all I know is that it is frustrating as hell.

So please call MSFT if you have this issue and lets see if they can finally correct it in Windows 8

Or we all have to go to iTunes

Which has its own issues as you likely know.

I am so desparate to solve this that I will even leave my mobile # to anyone who believes they have the answer. Perhaps I should offer a reward.

Sheepdog wrote:I am having this very same issue.

I have turned off the automatic update in WMP11.
I have run AlbumArtTagger to remove album art not matching my storage.
I open mediamonkey and the art is gone.
I close MM and reopen it and lo and behold it's back.
I have searched (checked show hidden files and folders) my hard drives for folder.jpg and albumart and can't locate anything yet these images keep showing up.

I want my images stored in the tag without folder.jpg

Any suggestions for me?

I am running Vista Home Premium and MM3

by **Guest** » Wed Aug 20, 2008 6:30 am

wmp creates an album art cache in "C:\Documents and Settings\USER_NAME_HERE\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player\Art Cache" (that's for win xp). You should find this in your computer and delete it. In vista i suppose it woud be somewhere around C:\Users\USER_NAME_HERE\...

by **nohitter151** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 5:11 pm

You can remove all music from Windows Media Player by selecting all music from the music node then right clicking and hitting Remove from Library; that is, unless you have some reason to keep the music in there.

Anyhow, the above solution of telling MM not to "Scan Track directories for Album Art" should prevent any problems caused by WMP or Zune.

by **Sheepdog** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 5:07 pm

renowden wrote:That is why many of us have abandoned WMP in favour of MM

I was going insane with the way it kept overriding my decisions.

Yeah. the issue is that when I open up a video it opens with WMP and then bastardizes my music files in the process.

by **renowden** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 1:14 pm

That is why many of us have abandoned WMP in favour of MM

I was going insane with the way it kept overriding my decisions.

by **Sheepdog** » Sun Jan 13, 2008 1:22 am

Thanks for that. I did speak too soon since the next run of MM and there I had multiple album artwork I didn't want. It's a shame you can't turn that "feature" off in the zune software. Figures M$ would do something like that. WMP screws everything up too.

by **nohitter151** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 9:57 pm

The Zune software takes all the Album art from the tags and extracts them into the folders, this is a feature you cannot turn off. The best solution to keep those files out of MM is to see Tools->Options->Library and uncheck "Scan Track directories for Album Art"

by **Sheepdog** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 9:36 pm

Aha! I just searched my hard drives for just art and found a folder with ZuneArt images in it. I have a zune player and the zune software must be the culprit. I have the auto update album art and media information unchecked in those settings too so not sure where zune got those images to begin with. Just updating in case someone else runs into the same issue in the future.

Here is a thread that the zune forums about fixing art issues. http://forums.zune.net/1093/ShowPost.aspx

by **Sheepdog** » Sat Jan 12, 2008 9:10 pm

I am having this very same issue.

I have turned off the automatic update in WMP11.
I have run AlbumArtTagger to remove album art not matching my storage.
I open mediamonkey and the art is gone.
I close MM and reopen it and lo and behold it's back.
I have searched (checked show hidden files and folders) my hard drives for folder.jpg and albumart and can't locate anything yet these images keep showing up.

I want my images stored in the tag without folder.jpg

Any suggestions for me?

I am running Vista Home Premium and MM3

by **nohitter151** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 11:55 am

Then it should be gone. If the art comes back, its because WMP is searching the internet for album art and redownloading it (you can disable this in the WMP options.) WMP does not save art to tags.

by **dreddy** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 8:05 pm

Oh, I should've mentioned this: I deleted all those files including folder.jpg's. That was the first thing i did, actually.

Windows Media Player 11's embedded album art

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