Album Art Issue

[SAS]

Hi All, I have a strange issue I hope someone can assist me with.

I Have a number of songs I usual keep in an Playlist as Misc Songs, its
never been an isue with any WMP version i can have multiple misc songs for
the album with different artists and song titles, and each can have a folder
under album art with there own album art picture.

This worked fine under XP however I upgraded to Vista Ultimate and now have
an issue

Some of the Misc Songs folders have the correct album art, others have the
wrong art they are sharing 2 or 3 album art pictures instead and adding the
art manually doesn't fix the issue.

Intrestingly if I play the songs I do get the correct artwork. However if I
sync with my PDA I do not get the correct art. I have deleted the Folder.jpg
and other jpg's but as soon as I start WMP back up the same album art issues
return.

Does anyone have any ideas of how to resolve this issue...

Thanks

[Dale]

Are these files MP3 or WMA?

If MP3, then embedded in the track ID3 tag, and in either case then in the
Windows Media Player library database files, there is information identifying
the specific track and what album it was ripped from

Based on this identifying information, Windows Media Player 11 will download
and install album art for each track automatically - if you don't have your
own higher quality source of images, then this is a good thing.

If there are multiple songs from multiple albums in the same folder, I don't
know how WMP chooses which to use for the Folder.jpg and to represent the
entire folder but it does choose just one. In the case where you have the
right album art, WMP just happened to make the right choice. Where you have
the wrong album art, WMP's algorithm didn't work for you.

When playing, WMP chooses from embedded art first, or the correct -
associated with the specific track - image that it downloaded to your
folders. That's another good thing usually.

So, if I understand you correctly, you are creating these "custom album
collections" and want to use the specific album art you specify for the
entire album?

There are a couple things to try. First, try just making sure that you set
the album name to the same for each in your custom collection and set the
album artist to "Various Artists" or to some common name. In some cases,
that lets WMP know these tracks from different artists belong together in
this instance.

If that doesn't solve the problem, then delete the tracks from your WMP
library - but not from your hard drive. Delete any unwanted album art images.

Then download one of my two programs from the links below. You can use the
ID3 Tag Backup program to remove the tags completely from the files and open
the files in WMP 11 to re-build the tags. This should dissassociate the
tracks from their original source and cause WMP 11 to have to settle on using
your manual art because it doesn't know what else to do. Alternatively, you
can use the ID3 Raw Tag Viewer to remove all of the PRIV frames from the
ID3V2.3 tag giving, effectively, the same result.

Now add the tracks back to your library by dragging and dropping them onto
your WMP Library view.

http://www.dalepreston.com/Blog/2007/01/removing-id3-tags.html

http://www.dalepreston.com/Blog/2007/02/id3-raw-tag-viewer.html

Hope this helps,

Dale
--
Dale Preston
MCAD C#
MCSE, MCDBA

[SAS]

Dale Thank you for the reply,

I tried both your programes neither worked for me unfortunately, I think i
may not of described the issue fully last time.

I have a folder marked Misc, in which i have about 110 MP3 files, of these
about 70% have the correct Album Art, The Albums are marked as Misc Songs
and the artists are then under the Album Info.

So I have 40 folders in Album Art marked as Misc Songs with the Artist
underneath that have the correct Artwork, there are about 30 others that do
not have the correct artwork but do show the correct Artist info.

If I play any of the 110 Songs they all show the correct album art in the
min browser in the left hand side, all songs also have the correct artwork
in ITunes, but not Windows Media Connect or when syncing.

I have deleted all Album Art work from the system but the issue remained.

Thanks alot for the assistance!

"Dale" <dale...@nospam.nospam> wrote in message
news:DE5F97B0-BBC0-4E99...@microsoft.com...

[Dale]

Your description of your folder layout is not clear. Can you post a
screenshot from Explorer or a more clear description?

Dale

"SAS" <n...@spam.org> wrote in message
news:75652295-298C-4E16...@microsoft.com...