Album Art and general question

[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!

The other problem I am having has to do with adding or posting a thread to
this forum. My PC with Media Center on it doesn't open up anything for me to
type in. It just stays on the forum screen with all of the questions. I am
writing this question from another PC I have.

Thanks in advance, so far I don't care for Media Center 2005 but I am sure
there is a lot I still need to learn.

[Pyranha Man]

If you want to get rid of the headphones there's a couple of things you need
to do.

1. Uncheck the box in the tools/options/library tab, retrieve missing
information from the internet, as without doing this media player will
overwrite any changes you make to sort your album art.

2. Before you add your own album art make sure you delete any HIDDEN image
files that media player has put in your music folders. To show hidden files,
when in a folder go to the tools/folder options/view tab then check the show
hidden files button.

Once you have taken the above steps then put your own album covers in the
folders using the name folder.jpg and they will show up. Or use a good tool
such as Tag and Rename to do it for you.

Good luck

Pyranha Man

[TJ]

Thanks for the advice but I tried unchecking the box and I still only have
headphones showing up on the main page. I am not trying to add any of my own
album art but rather just use what is showing up in the bottom left corner
when I actually play the CD in Media Center.

[rcolbeck]

You need to follow Pyranha's instructions to get it to work. I've had to do
the same.
Your mp3s need to be stored in folders by album and in that folder you
should have just one jpeg file which is your cover art called folder.jpg.
Once you turn on viewing of hidden files, see if there are any jpeg files in
the album folder. If so and one is the album cover, make sure it is called
folder.jpg or rename it to be so. Delete all other jpegs. If there aren't
any, then you need to manually download an album art jpeg from the internet
(lots of sites for this including music purchase sites like amazon). I think
that the art you are seeing for individual songs are not individual files but
actually images embedded in the id3 tag of the song itself. There are some
programs that allow you to copy those images to separate files. You should
generally also be able to use Media Player to download the album art (use the
retrieve option and then Find or Update Album Info, but turn off the retrieve
option afterwards)

Send more questions if you don't understand.

..Roger

[TJ]

Thanks for the response. I will give this a try again. I did notice that I
had other jpeg files in each albums folder that were hidden such as 'album
art.smalljpeg..large..etc' I also had the 'folder.jpeg' file which did
contain the correct album art. I guess I misunderstood some of the other
posts and just thought that the different sizes were for different areas that
the art would show up. I will try to delete all of the other jpeg files in
each albums folder and see if that works. Hopefully so as music is the main
reason I bought this PC as eventually I'd like to use it to put alot of my
old vinyl records on CD's.

Do you have any idea why I would not be able to post or reply to this forum
on my media center PC? I am signed in but when I click on post or reply it
does nothing. I am writing from another PC now. This isn't as big of a deal
however as the album art is.

Thanks again for everyone's input. I really appreciate it.

Tim

[Barry Watzman]

The tags of the songs are absolutely critical to having the album art
feature work.

What program are you attempting to use for newsgroup reading/writing on
the MCE system?

[TJ]

I have nothing set up for reading/writing newsgroups. I am using Office 2003
on my system and as part of that I am using Outlook 2003 for my email client.
I am still having problems getting the album art to show up on the 'My
Music' window after trying the suggestions of deleting all of the album art
files except for the 'folder.jpg' file. The album cover does show up when I
double click on the album to play it but other than that I just see the
headphones. Very frustrating.

[TJ]

Can anybody help me figure out how to view the album art for each album? I
have tried all suggestions and still only see headphones.