I'm Sick and Tired of Looking at Ugly Album Art

[Jason Dunn]

It's roll my sleeves and rant time!<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/albumart-FOLDER-small.png" /><br /><br />Windows Media Center on Vista displays album art when listening to an album. This is a good thing - I'm a visual person and I enjoy seeing the album art for the song I'm listening to. The problem is that the album art displayed is the low-resolution (200 x 200 or 240 x 240) highly-compressed JPEGs pulled from the folder, rather than the 600 x 600 lightly compressed JPEGs I have embedded in the file itself. The result is a badly pixellated image that looks quite bad on my 26” LCD TV. It's hard to show you how this looks online, but here's my best effort.<br /><br />I’ve created two rough mock-up images that shows what I’m seeing (<a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/albumart-FOLDER.png">albumart-FOLDER.png</a>) and what I’d be seeing if Media Center displayed the image embedded inside the file (<a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/albumart-FILE.png">albumart-FILE.png</a>). If you open up each of those images in a different tab and flip back and forth you'll see a huge difference: it's like night and day. Now imagine someone who has Media Center running on a 50” TV and you’ll see why the quality of the image matters. Apple seems to understand why quality album art matters, because most iTunes album art lookups will give you 600 x 600 album art.<!><br /><br />In my research I discovered that if there is no album art in the folder, Media Center will show the embedded album art - but because Windows Media Player 11 and the Zune software will automatically extract embedded album art and place it in the folder if they see it's missing, this bit of information doesn't help at all. The solution? Media Center should display the album art inside the audio file as a first priority, and only display the folder.jpg file if there’s no embedded album art. This is a best of both worlds solution. <br /><br />What’s funny about all of this is that Windows Media Player 11 <b>does</b> display the embedded album art (if it re-sized it to fit the player that would be great, but that’s beside the point), and the Vista shell displays embedded album art when browsing through a folder. It’s only Media Center that seems to be ignoring embedded album art.

[Dyvim]

Definitely lame. What you need is a program to extract the album art from your files and replace the 200x200 folder.jpg with it. Then MC would be forced to display it.

I know there are programs that do the reverse (embed folder.jpg into music files in the same folder).

I'm currently in the process of getting 600x600 artwork for all my digital music. I feel your pain.

[Tim Williamson]

Can't you set WMP11 to not automatically download missing tag information? In this case wouldn't the album art .jpg not automatically be put in the folder, and Media Center would be forced to display the embedded art?

Does Xbox 360 display embedded or folder art?

[Jason Dunn]

Definitely lame. What you need is a program to extract the album art from your files and replace the 200x200 folder.jpg with it. Then MC would be forced to display it.

So, thing is, I've been working toward doing exactly that for months: MediaMonkey, along with a script, will do exactly that. But you know what? The Zune desktop software, will overwrite the 600x600 JPEGs with it's own crappy 240x240 JPEGs. I kid you not. :roll: I'm trying to find a solution to how to stop the Zune software from doing that, but right now it's not looking too good... :-(

[Tim Williamson]

Definitely lame. What you need is a program to extract the album art from your files and replace the 200x200 folder.jpg with it. Then MC would be forced to display it.

So, thing is, I've been working toward doing exactly that for months: MediaMonkey, along with a script, will do exactly that. But you know what? The Zune desktop software, will overwrite the 600x600 JPEGs with it's own crappy 240x240 JPEGs. I kid you not. :roll: I'm trying to find a solution to how to stop the Zune software from doing that, but right now it's not looking too good... :-(

How about don't use Zune Desktop... :lol:

You wonder what programmers were thinking when they do something like that. Why doesn't it simply verify whether or not there's already album art, if there already is then don't touch it, or check the resolution, and if a larger cover is available then replace the smaller cover, or something like that.

[Jason Dunn]

Can't you set WMP11 to not automatically download missing tag information? In this case wouldn't the album art .jpg not automatically be put in the folder, and Media Center would be forced to display the embedded art?

The problem is that the Zune doesn't display embedded album art - so it NEEDS the album art in the folder. So I can't abandon folder album art completely...

Does Xbox 360 display embedded or folder art?

Great question...I'm willing to bet it works like Media Center does, displaying folder art first and embedded art second. I'm not sure though.

[Jason Dunn]

How about don't use Zune Desktop... :lol:

No Zune desktop software = no Zune sync. So not much a solution there, sorry. ;-)

You wonder what programmers were thinking when they do something like that.

Yeah...I'm truly staggered by how little Microsoft seems to care about the QUALITY of the experience they offer customers.

[Dyvim]

But you know what? The Zune desktop software, will overwrite the 600x600 JPEGs with it's own crappy 240x240 JPEGs. I kid you not. :roll: I'm trying to find a solution to how to stop the Zune software from doing that, but right now it's not looking too good... :-(

Have you tried marking the jpegs as read only?

[Jason Dunn]

Have you tried marking the jpegs as read only?

Hrm. No. Hrm. Good idea! Let me give that a try. :-)

[ryan_hurst]

Have you tried marking the jpegs as read only?

Hrm. No. Hrm. Good idea! Let me give that a try. :-)

In the case of MCE cached down-sized copies of the images are created, see http://thedigitallifestyle.com/cs/forums/2383/ShowThread.aspx#2383 for information and a script that will update these cached copies with your folder.jpg (whcih should in theory be the un-resized copy of the image).