Re: iTunes interfering with MCE album artwork?
- From: John Lockwood <john.lockwood@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 13:13:36 +0000
On 17/11/06 00:18, in article
0B7376B3-BF73-469E-91A1-4A3679C68039@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, "GreenButtonPusher"
<GreenButtonPusher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Recently, I upgrade iTunes to its newest version. Curiously, I find it
automatically "updating" its library, as well (which has many of the same
files that I listen to in Media Center/WMP10). Later on, I go to listen to
music in MC, only to find some of the album art of a few of the songs playing
"blacked out." This only seemed to happen with files that I personally
placed artwork on in WMP10 (via the Advanced Tag Editor). Apparently, iTunes
is now using the same exact picture, as deleting one pic in one player
deletes the pic in the other. Meanwhile, MC is left out of the "sharing,"
with only files located in the same album folder showing their appropriate
image (since it is associated with the folder itself). In other words, files
associated directly with album artwork are being blacked out, unlike the
files associated with folder images, which are fine. I'm thinking this is
more of an iTunes-created problem than that from IE7.
Is this an isolated thing, or is it more widespread?
(For the record, I have MCE 2004 via SP2)
I have iTunes 7 and WMP 10 (and Media Center 2005) all sharing the same
music. The music is all in Apple Lossless format. Below are my findings and
suggestions.
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.
From your description it sounds like you are using method 1 and thereforealso using MP3 music format.
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 method 4 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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