Album Art

[Xevallah]

So I'm fed up with WMP 11 having all of my artwork at 200x200 pixels. Now, before I go through the motions of manual replacing the embedded artwork for my music I'd like to get a grasp on the relationship between the artwork used for the Zune, the artwork used for the media library navigation, and the artwork used for the now playing. From what I can gather the now playing is the embedded artwork, but deleting all of the 200x200 and 75x75 pixel artwork embedded does absolutely nothing to replace the artwork in album viewing mode of the library, nor does my Zune artwork change. Well, I'm not sure I want the zune artwork to change, but I'm not clear who's getting what from where when I delete everything and replace it with a 500x500 version of the artwork.

[Jason Dunn]

Frankly there are so many combinations I can't quite remember what's what. But here's what I did:

1) I deleted all the hidden JPG files in my music folders
2) I used MediaMonkey to embed album art in all my music files
3) I let the Zune software scan the folders, when it detects the embedded art it extracts. The Zune software extracts the images are a higher resolution, I believe 320 x 320.
4) I re-build my WMP library as the last step, and only for Windows Media Center to function...if memory serves WMP won't touch the files that the Zune software created. And WMP will read embedded images first before folder.jpg and album.jpg files.

If you're looking for high-res album art, look here:

The High-Res Album Art Project by Jason & Ashley Dunn (http://www.jasondunn.com/albumart/)

[Xevallah]

Do you know where WMP 11 gets the image for the album cover inside the library? Like when you're looking up albums in tile mode? I delete all of the hidden and visible jpegs and replace the embedded artwork with the new one and add a folder.jpg for good measure and WMP 11 still shows the old album artwork!

Very nice collection of high quality album art, by the way. :)

[Jason Dunn]

I delete all of the hidden and visible jpegs and replace the embedded artwork with the new one and add a folder.jpg for good measure and WMP 11 still shows the old album artwork!

Did you also turn un-check the box for "Hide protected operating system files"? There are some JPEGs that are hidden by that check-box as well. The fastest way to get everything is to do a search for *.jpg in the top-level folder where all your music is and, with the search turned on for hidden files, delete all the JPEGs.

And you're using Windows Media Player 11, right? Is this on Vista or XP? Because I just tested one of my files and I'm definitely seeing a 600 x 600 JPEG and not the 200 x 200 JPEGs in the folder where this album is...so it's displaying the embedded album art not the art in the folder.

Very nice collection of high quality album art, by the way. :)

Thanks! It was a LOT of work, but it was worth it because I love my album art. :D

[Xevallah]

I'm using WMP11 on XP. I unchecked the hide protected op files box and have hidden files viewable. Deleted all of the artwork and media monkey shows a 1400x1400 (too lazy to resize) embedded but WMP11 refuses to update with fresh artwork. (still has 300x300)

Is there anywhere else WMP11 might be storing the pics it uses for the album browser?

Edit: I've also started to embed fairly large (>1mb) artwork in my files. (drag and drop from iTunes, again laziness) Will this create problems for me with the zune?

[Jason Dunn]

There's no logical reason why WMP11 is still showing you the low-res version of the album art. What happens if you take one of those files with the embedded album art (1 MB embedding is pretty big!) and play it on WMP on another computer? Does it show you the high-res album art?

What about uninstalling and re-installing WMP11?