Re: show album artwork in windows media center 2005
- From: John Lockwood <john.lockwood@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 11:44:21 +0100
On 5/10/06 09:51, in article
CE44BB20-E610-4177-99F4-C7366CE99B60@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, "dave"
<dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have recently purchased a laptop with MCE 2005 installed, however i cannot
get all of my music album artwork showing. Almost all of my music is in .mp3
and ripped from cd's using itunes. Upon set up of MCE i selected for the
software to display album covers
can anybody help me here.
Dave
In theory, the following should apply
1. iTunes embeds artwork in MP3s
2. WMP reads embedded artwork from MP3s and displays it
3. MCE 2005 displays what WMP gives it
However my own experience is that while WMP will usually be ok MCE will not.
The ONLY 100% reliable method I have found is to do the following.
1. Rip using iTunes, you don't have to use MP3, e.g. you could use AAC
2. Embed art using iTunes (this ensures iTunes can display the artwork)
3. Add albums to WMP (WMP will obviously be able to read MP3s but if you use
AAC then you need to ensure it has a suitable codec and a plugin like WMPTSE
to read the MPEG4/AAC tags
Note: When I briefly tried WMP 11 beta with MCE 2005 I tried using 'drag and
drop' for artwork. This worked fine in WMP 11 beta but did not show up in
MCE 2005. I suspect with WMP 11 beta it will still be necessary to do the
following, however I reverted back to using WMP 10.
4. If you used MP3 (with embedded art) then WMP might already be displaying
the artwork, but as I stated we need to do more to ensure 100% reliability
in MCE as well. So the next step is to select the album in WMP and right
click and then choose "Find Album Info".
5. You then use the "Find Album Info" facility to select and apply artwork
from Microsoft's meta-data servers. Note: typically this artwork will only
be in the region of 200x200 pixels. [You can tick the apply to entire album
box at the top so you don't have to do each track individually.]
The Find Album Info command will create several files in the Album's folder
with names like -
folder.jpg
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
AlbumArt_{903B2B7B-21D7-4BA2-B72C-5535C4A0A3B1}_Large.jpg
AlbumArt_{903B2B7B-21D7-4BA2-B72C-5535C4A0A3B1}_Small.jpg
Note: while WMP will recognise and use just the folder.jpg file I find that
MCE 2005 will not do so. However a full set like above does work 100%
reliably for me.
As I indicated above, the "Find Album Info" only gives you artwork in the
region of 200x200 pixels (and that's for the LARGE version)! Once you have
done the above, you can overwrite the files with larger better quality
artwork AS LONG AS YOU USE THE EXACT SAME FILE NAMES. I don't bother
replacing the 'small' versions.
It is possible that the "Find Album Info" command will also replace the
embedded artwork (for MP3 files), if so you might want to later use iTunes
to replace with better (larger) images. I don't use MP3s (I use Apple
Lossless in iTunes and WMP and MCE 2005) so I don't have this problem (even
with WMPTSE, WMP cannot access and thereby overwrite embedded art in MPEG4
files i.e. AAC and Apple Lossless).
For those poor misfortunates who only use WMP, iTunes typically gives you
600x600 pixel images for applying to tracks you have ripped from CDs. The
iTunes supplied artwork also does not have a white border around it (which
Amazon artwork often does, Amazon and Walmart artwork is also only 500x500
pixels).
I have done this for dozens of albums and this approach is 100% reliable
(unlike folder.jpg by itself).
Cheers, John Lockwood
.
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