Re: Pasted album art does not show up in "Now Playing"

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On 25/5/06 18:04, in article
CE5C6107-8E56-4EAF-B922-9CA4D978AC00@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, "wastedyuthe"
<wastedyuthe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have the same problem. The pasted album art only seems to want to appear
for the first track in the Now Playing tab. Hopefully the programming team
are aware and it will be fixed before final release. I am sure they won't
miss something like this. There are no suggestions I can give- it is a bug
in the program nothing more. We just have to wait for the next beta. It
would be nice if one of the programming team confirmed this bug has been
recognised.

"Eddie" wrote:

I've pasted several cover arts for different albums, they show up fine in the
Library View, but in the Now Playing tab, when playing songs from the albums
that have a pasted cover art they don't want to appear.

Any suggestions? Thank you in advance. Regards.

WMP version: 11.0.5358.4827 (Beta)

The way WMP (and MCE) handle cover art is awful. If you are ripping from a
CD WMP will (allegedly) sort things out for you, and if you are using MP3
tracks (with embedded art) it will also have a chance of working. However if
you importing tracks in another format then WMP/MCE makes you do a lot of
work.

Here is what I found, and how I managed to get ALL my tracks to show art in
both WMP and MCE.

1. Despite what some documentation suggests, simply sticking a folder.jpg in
the right folder is NOT enough.
2. WMP only supports embedded art for MP3 (and probably WMA) format files.
It does not support it for AAC, AIFF, FLAC, etc., etc., etc.
3. WAV will not support embedded art EVER.
4. If you import an album with no album artist set and use the "Find Album
Info" to set a picture and album artist for the first track, that will work
for that one track. If you then DRAG (in WMP) the other tracks in to that
correctly configured album, they will assume the same settings as the
existing track (hopefully).
5. If you have an album you have just imported with the correct Album artist
and do "Find Album Info" you can assign a picture to the track BUT YOU HAVE
TO REPEAT THIS FOR EACH AND EVERY TRACK in the album.

Note: If when using "Find Album Info" you choose a different album in the
found list, then different album art files will be created for that track
(even if they look the same when viewed). This is easy to happen since the
metadata database that Microsoft hosts and uses is full of crap and I have
yet to find an album were all the tracks produced the same "Find Album Info"
results. I have got round this by assigning obviously wrong track info to a
track (e.g. assign track 2 details to track 6 as well as track 2) and then
manually editing the track number and name afterwards.

While iTunes itself has no built-in tools to 'find' tag (album) info other
than at the time of ripping a CD (by looking up from Gracenote CDDB), there
are a host of third party utilities to help you do this. iTunes does however
make it very, very, easy to add or alter tag info on one or AS MANY tracks
as you want. For example you can add embedded art to BOTH entire disks of a
two disk set in one operation (rather than as with WMP having to do each
track of each disk individually). iTunes also supports tags (and embedded
art) for far more file formats than WMP (even than WMP11 which is no better
than WMP10 for tag support).

Note: Now that I have seen WMPs use of the Album Artist tag, I have to agree
that it is a very useful tag and it is is unfortunate that currently iTunes
does not support it itself.

Now that I have tamed the beast that is WMP and got album art showing for
EACH track, I am disappointed that WMP is too stupid to automatically scale
the art to fit the "Now Playing" window. Small art does not fill it, large
art is cropped. This is particularly stupid of WMP since it CAN scale videos
and visualisations to fit.

Note: Gracenote's metadata is not perfect either but a LOT better than
Microsofts. One example of Gracenote getting it wrong was a two disk set in
which disc 1 was labelled incorrectly as (Disc 1) and disk 2 was labelled
correctly as [Disc 2]. [General consensus seems to be that additional info
like this should be in square brackets. Being wrong is bad enough but they
were not even consistent!]

Cheers, John Lockwood

.

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