'my music' album art thumbnails

[avi]

Hi. this may seem like a dumb question but I have never ran across this and
need some assistance and have had trouble locating the exact answer on the
net.

I ripped my cd's to mp3's in the late 90's using winamp before thumbnails
were really an option and never ripped any cd cover/album picture
information. Consequently, I never had any pictures on the folders which
held albums prevously. However, I recently purchased a new computer with
windows media center edition last month and was transferring all my old music
to the 'my music' folder on the new computer and miraculously windows somehow
located the album art for 90+% of my folders and made it the thumbnail image
for the folder in real time during the transfer.

however, it has never done this again! whenever i add new music to the
folder, it no longer finds any album art. rather, it gives me a generic
thumbnail of a folder. Can someone pls answer/explain the following ?'s:

(1) how do i get this folder to automatically look up album information
again and update the thumbnails as folders are moved into the 'my music'
folder? is there some setting that i need to turn on or program i might have
been runing simultaneously when transferring the files last time that
resulted in this haphazzard benefit?

and

(2) if i want to change the album art on a folder (pick a different more
appropriate album cover), how do i do so?

thanks so much for your help. . . it's sincerely appreciated.

[Mike Williams]

avi wrote:
> Hi. this may seem like a dumb question but I have never ran across this and
> need some assistance and have had trouble locating the exact answer on the
> net.
>
> I ripped my cd's to mp3's in the late 90's using winamp before thumbnails
> were really an option and never ripped any cd cover/album picture
> information. Consequently, I never had any pictures on the folders which
> held albums prevously. However, I recently purchased a new computer with
> windows media center edition last month and was transferring all my old music
> to the 'my music' folder on the new computer and miraculously windows somehow
> located the album art for 90+% of my folders and made it the thumbnail image
> for the folder in real time during the transfer.
>
> however, it has never done this again! whenever i add new music to the
> folder, it no longer finds any album art. rather, it gives me a generic
> thumbnail of a folder. Can someone pls answer/explain the following ?'s:
>
> (1) how do i get this folder to automatically look up album information
> again and update the thumbnails as folders are moved into the 'my music'
> folder? is there some setting that i need to turn on or program i might have
> been runing simultaneously when transferring the files last time that
> resulted in this haphazzard benefit?

The only way you can get WMP to change the thumbnails is to use the
Album Wizard to lookup and find a record of the album that has the
correct thumbnail. However with WMP library updates for an album are all
or nothing, so if you have modified any text metadata then they will be
overwritten too. NB The "only add missing information" field for library
updates does NOT apply to album thumbnails - it will overwrite the
thumbnail even if you already have one. So, whenever you
upgrade/reinstall WMP it will look up each album and potentially
overwrite or delete any album thumbnails that you have. AND because the
album database is a dog's breakfast, you may find that albums which were
correctly found before have been replaced by less complete/correct data,
so your thumbnails may be overwritten again! NB none of these bugs are
considered important enough to fix in WMP v9 or v10!!

>
> and
>
> (2) if i want to change the album art on a folder (pick a different more
> appropriate album cover), how do i do so?

Now, you can use alternate means to update the album thumbnail. One is
to use the nifty Album Art fixer http://www.avsoft.nl/artfixer/ and the
other is to manually copy image files to your Album folder in explorer.
There is some background on the issue in my blog postings from 2004
here: http://msmvps.com/blogs/thinice/archive/2004/11/14/19085.aspx

NB regardless of the method used to get album art, the only way I have
found to stop WMP from subsequently overwriting it with incorrect art or
placeholder art is to use the Advanced Tag Editor to place the artwork
inside each album track.

One should also make sure that your Album Art is backed up along with
your tracks. If using standard backup tools then you'll need to make
sure that hidden & system files are included.