Viewing Album Art and Artist?
Jack3000
to come up with a number of questions:
1) I don't see the album (cover) art when I'm viewing ALL of the
albums. It's only when until I select an album, and mouseover a song,
that I see the album art in the left hand corner. Is there any way to
make the album art come up when I view ALL albums?
2) When I view all of the albums, the corresponding artist is "unknown
artist". It's not until I select an album and then mouseover a song
that I see the corresponding singer/band. Is there any way to make the
artist come up when viewing all of the albums?
3) When I finally select an album with a generic title like "Greatest
Hits", I may see a number of artists, who all produced an album called
"Greatest Hits". Is it possible that these different albums with the
same name can be shown separately? (that is, without having to
resorting to retitling these album titles?)
4) And finally, is it possible to use 3rd party Music software (aka
non-Microsoft) in conjunction with media center, like musicmatch, or
are we stuck using the windows media center?
thanks!
Jack3000
> non-Microsoft) in conjunction with media center, like musicmatch, or
> are we stuck using the windows media center?
Meant to say media "player", not media "center"
Charlie
It sounds like you are in the same boat I was. I had ripped 500+ CDs onto my hard drive using MusicMatch.
MusicMatch embeds the album art into the ID3V2 tags. Each individual MP3 has the album art information stored with it.
From what I can tell, Windows Media Player 9 (WMP9) which is used by Media Center, gets the album art information from different places, depending upon where you are in the navigation process. When looking at an entire album, WMP9 looks at the folder level for the existence of album art information. Unfortunately, MusicMatch does not create album art in all the places that WMP9 looks. My observations:
1) To display album art at the artist level – all album folders for a given artist, WMP9 looks for the existence of a file called folder.jpg in each album folder – folder.jpg is a hidden folder that contains the album art information. MusicMatch does not create folder.jpg when ripping Albums to MP3 (or at least it didn’t when I ripped my albums).
2) To display album art at the album level - again, WMP9 looks for the existence of a file called folder.jpg in each album folder.
3) To view album art at the song level, WMP9 can get the album information from the actual song - via the Mp3's ID3 tag – which MusicMatch does add.
It sounds like you're having the same problem that I had - i.e. I had album art embedded in each song, but I didn't have album art defined for each album’s folder. Effectively, WMP9 does not have the ability to see that all songs in a folder have the same album art, so that album art should be used when viewing the folder/album that those songs are stored in.
As you probably have done, I added my music to WMP9’s music library so Media Center could see it - allowing me to access my music from the Media Center interface. When I did that, WMP9 automatically added folder.jpg to some of my album folders (about half). It does so in the background, over time. I pulled my hair out trying to figure out how to WMP9 to recognize the rest of my album folders and automatically add folder.jpg for, and could find no solution or way to get WMP9 to try to review and add folder.jpg again. I ended up getting the album art for my remaining albums, resizing them to 200X200 (the size preferred by WMP9) using a simple batch process - and then saving them as folder.jpg to the remaining 250 albums that were missing folder.jpg - a wasted Saturday morning. You may also want to add a smaller version of the album art in each folder at 75X75 and name it albumartsmall.jpg - there are some windows programs that look for this smaller art folder to display album art in smaller spaces (you'll notice that, where WMP9 has automatically added the folder.jpg for you, it also created/added albumartsmall.jpg).
To see if WMP9 has already added any album art for you, you'll need to enable XP's ability to see hidden files, as folder.jpg and albumartsmall.jpg are hidden files. To do this, go to Windows Explorer and select Tools/Folder Options and select the "View" tab. Scroll down and select "show hidden files and folders". Now go to your album folders and look fot the presence of folder.jpg and albumartsmall.jpg. Where it does not exist, you will have to create it.
If you take the path I took and add the album art manually, an easy way to get at the MusicMatch album art is to (from within MusicMatch) right click on a song from the album that you need to get the art from and select “Edit Tag”. You should be given the option to copy the album art to your clip board. You can then paste it into Paint and save it as folder.jpg.
The album art “experience” was my least favorite part of getting my new Media Center up and running – Microsoft really needs to create an easier way to identify and create folder.jpg.
Good luck!
Charlie
Jack3000
I hadn't known how involved including album art was on all levels, but
it looks like I'll have to do the same thing that you did. I have a
few more of my CDs to rip to MP3, so maybe I'll look into having the
Microsoft application do this instead of MusicMatch.
Jack3000
But I still can't see the artist on the album level. I see the album
art, the album title, but the artist is still "unknown artist". Do I
need to add another hidden file with that info so I may be able to
view the artist's name?
Thanks!
Jack