Still can't see album art in 'My Music'!!

[TJ]

I have a brand new Dell XPS that I intend to use primarily for audio and
video. When I call up 'My Music' all I see is a generic pair of headphones
for each CD I copied to the library. I am going nuts because I have looked
at some of the comments from this forum and tried many of the suggestions but
still only have the headphones and not the album art. I even tried the
'artfixer' application mentioned and it found the artwork only shows the
artwork in the left corner while the CD is playing. Can anyone help me
please!!! I would be very grateful!

[D F Porter]

If you are importing / attaching an image file to the album folder in your
media library, make sure it is a .jpg file and not a .gif..

Also, I had a similar issue with split info and images on some albums. If I
searched for the album name, it shows files (tracks), Searching by artist
also shows files but did not show as an album. …..If this is the case, ensure
the album name and artist are identical for both sets of searches, as listed
in the MCE info. The system sorts it's self out from there.

[Jelle]

Try this app, it will fix your problem
http://www.avsoft.nl/artfixer/

Greetings
Jelle Bastiaensen
Computer Networking Belgium

[JasonR]

Ok, I'll try to help since I just successfully got all my music onto my Media
PC working properly with all the correct tags and album art showing correctly.

First off, let me say that unless you have alot of time, alot of paitence,
and a real desire to make this work right....you'll be hard pressed to get it
done. It's not really that "hard" but it's just time consuming.

Here is and example of how I had my music arranged in folders on my other
pc: My Music > Blues > Big Al Carson > Live At The Funky Pirate > Mustang
Sally (song title) My point is I had all my music arranged in a hierarchy of
genre, artist, and ablum. In each album folder I had the proper album art
displayed by including the album art jpeg named "folder". One would think
that MCE would see all of this and it would be integrated easily but
obviously it is not.

I started by downloading a free MP3 tagger called The Godfather and going
thru every song I had and making sure it was properly tagged; artist, album,
title and I got rid of alot of other unnecessary junk tag stuff that I didn't
care about. Then I opened up Window Media Player and cleared out the music
library. I started bringing in my music a few albums at a time. I would then
have to open every album and select all the songs for that album at once and
open WMP's built in tagger. Then look for the tag field named "Album Artist".
This is an option that I have yet to see in any other tagging software,
although I'm sure some do have it. Anyway, in that blank, you enter the
artist name. So you will have a blank called Artist and a blank called Album
Artist, both need to be filled in the same. The Album Artist name is what MCE
looks for and without it filled in properly MCE's music is a MESS!!!

Once the tags are all done correctly and the songs are sorted to folders by
album title, make sure the correct album art is in that folder and saved by
the name "folder". I would do 8-10 albumns in The Godfather, import them into
WMP's library edit the Album Artis tag, open MCE and make sure everything
worked properly. If it didn't, I'd fix it then and there. It was a slow
process but it was worth it. Now I have a full library of properly tagged
songs and albums in MCE and all the album art is displayed perfectly.

****A word of caution**** (What I am about to say may not happen on your pc
but I'm going to tell you what happened on my pc.) Do NOT under any
circumstances let WMP try to update the info for songs, albums etc. Much of
the info it gets is wrong and even when it is correct, it will instert the
album art for that particular album in the folder 4 different times by 4
different names. For example: It will insert the album art into the folder
and name it something like "album art small" "album art medium" "album art
large" and then the proper name "folder". Well besides the fact that you
don't need the same are 4 different times in different sizes, for some ODD
reason MCE would not display the album art folder jpeg if any of those other
3 files were in the folder. I would just get the generic headphones art for
that folder. It took me a long time to finally figure out that it was those
other album art files were causing the problem. I'd go in there and delete
the 3 "album art" files that WMP put in there and leave the "folder" file and
bam MCE would display the art correctly. I know it doesn't make sense but I'm
telling you this from my hard learned experience.

I know that this is long, and probably doesn't make alot of sense. I'm not
that great at explaining. I took the info that I'd read here and just started
slowly experimenting with a few folders and importing them to see if they
worked. One key to remember is that often for the changes you made to your
songs/ablum art etc to show up, you'll need to delete them from your WMP
library, bring them back in and restart MCE. If not, MCE will be still show
the old/wrong album art etc.

Hope this helps a little and good luck. In the end it's worth it and it will
be very easy to bring in any new music correctly and easily.

-Jason

[TJ]

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. I really appreciate it.

[wafjr]

I had the same problem. I started a thread on January 15, 2005 about it. One
of the MCE Experts, Peter Nears fixed it for me. I is a simple registry
problem to solve.

Here is a link to the thread:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/newsgroups/reader.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter&mid=34646db8-15f6-414e-a571-3cea521e1e5f

After the fix, Peter posted an artilce on his Blog page. The link to that:

http://www.thenears.com/index.php?p=85

It was driving me nuts as well. But htis worked (I also have a Dell).

Bill

[TJ]

I am still working on this. To date I have added only a handful of CD's to
the PC using Media Player 10 and when I open Media Center I see only a
generic pair of headphones instead of the associated album art. I do only
have one folder named 'folder.jpg' for each album and when I open up that
particular CD to play it the album art does show. Am I correct in thinking
that I should be seeing the album art for each album/CD on the main Media
Center screen like I see the pictures in 'My Pictures'? In other words, when
I click on 'My Music' should I see a list of albums with the associated album
art? Right now I just see a pair of headphones for each CD I have copied to
my CD. I have tried a few suggestions such as using the 'artfixer'
application and verifying that the association in the 'perceived type' for
jpg is 'image' but I still only see the headphones. I am running Office 2003
on this PC if that makes any difference. I would welcome any suggestions as
I am going crazy trying to arrange my music.