Re: Cover Art MCE with IE7 FIX - UPDATE
- From: John Lockwood <john.lockwood@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2006 10:48:21 +0000
On 15/11/06 19:56, in article
AF3DFCA7-9070-495E-BF82-FE2FD2D4A5F1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Egor Buz"
<mrbuz@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For the benefit of Microsoft I am sending this, as my previous ³happy e-mail²
was a bit incorrect in terms of the cause of the problem.
Though I do not have problems now with album art in Media Center, there
still is a fault from the side of MS software developers.
I have tested this case by ripping a completely new CD without album art,
then pasting an image using only Media Player 11¹s Advanced Tag Editor.
After that in Media Center there were black squares again during playback
for that album¹s songs.
This test proves that it was not the fault of the ³Album Cover Art
Downloader², as it was not used in this instance at all.
Then, with the help of the ³Album Cover Art Downloader², I have deleted
images created by Media Player 11 from songs as described in the e-mail below
(without album header art).
Only then everything shows properly in all my media applications.
Thus I have to use third party software to make things work between
Microsoft IE7, Microsoft WMP11 and Microsoft Media Center and this is not the
way it should be in my opinion?
Album Art as a process in WMP/MCE sucks big time, this is mainly because the
of the multitude of different mechanisms used by Microsoft.
For WMP 10 the following are supported
1. Embedded art in MP3 (and probably WMA) tracks
2. manually added folder.jpg files
3. Art added using the "Find Album Info" command
Of these, my own experience is that only the third choice is 100% reliable
in getting artwork to also show in Media Center 2005. All three mechanisms
do work in WMP 10 itself.
For WMP 11 the situation is even more complex with the addition of a fourth
choice
4. Drag&Drop or Copy&Paste artwork (while this method in iTunes causes the
artwork to be embedded in a track, this is not the case with WMP11 - it
merely gets stored 'somewhere', I know this because you can in WMP11
drag&drop art for music formats that do not support embedded art).
When I briefly tried the beta version of WMP 11 I found like you that this
method did not work for Media Center (I got the black icon).
To reiterate, the only 100% reliable method I have found is to use the "Find
Album Info" command and apply this to all tracks in an album.
I have not yet upgraded to IE7 and WMP11 because my Media Center 2005 is
working well and I do not want to risk Microsoft breaking it.
Notes:
The quality of the meta data returned by "Find Album Info" is truly awful.
You can manually edit the meta data after using the "Find Album Info"
command, it is however important to first use this command because it adds
the info (and a link to the artwork) to a database that MediaCenter uses.
The jpegs returned by "Find Album Info" are a mere 200x200 pixels.
(Microsoft call this 'large'!)
You can manually replace the jpegs with bigger/better ones as long as you
use EXACTLY the same file name and location. I have replaced mine with
between 500x500 and 600x600 images I obtained either from the iTunes store
(600x600), Walmart (500x500), or Amazon (500x500).
You want to set WMP to never modify existing meta data, otherwise it might
downgrade your artwork back to 200x200.
As a comparison, iTunes used to use just one method of storing album art
which was to embed it in the track(s) for AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, and MP3
formats, and was 100% reliable and idiot proof. With iTunes 7, Apple added a
second mechanism (a "Get Album Artwork" command) and now some people using
iTunes also experience problems with artwork not always appearing as
expected. Power iTunes users like myself :-) therefore take the artwork
returned by this command and embed it in to the tracks.
.
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