Where does WMP11 store library's album art?

[benryves]

I'm getting there with my battle against the album art. ;)

By using a third party tag editor (http://www.mp3tag.de/) I can get away
with embedding high-quality art in the tracks, and also not be limited to
square album art. This is great, I can play the tracks in WMP and in the Now
Playing "Album Art" view can see unsquashed artwork that doesn't hurt the
eyes with ugly JPEG artifacts.

Not so much luck with the library itself, though - as it insists on resizing
all art to 200x200 (distorting the covers) and saving as extremely
low-quality JPEGs. Given that album covers tend to have text on them, this is
a bit of a problem.

I tried the obvious (show OS files, replace Folder.jpg with my own) but that
soon gets reverted to the 200x200 version. Is there a way I can stop this?
Some obscure trick to at least increase the resolution or JPEG quality?

WMP11 Beta 1 supported non-square album art, and didn't reduce everything to
200x200 via the tag editor, so I assume there is some reason for these
changes...

Given the emphasis on browsing your collection via album art and the general
aesthetics of the player with 11's official release, I'm a little surprised
the album art is treated so unfairly. :)

[Mike Williams]

It's still necessary to have a backup of your album art as WMP still doesn't
offer transparent or sufficiently granular control over what it does with
these files.

I played some tracks I hadn't exposed to v11 before (off an external drive)
and the existing album art in the album folder was overwritten by incorrect
art files. It's still a problem in v11 that album-art may be downloaded and
overwrite your existing files even if your settings are to only download
*missing* metadata.

More inline >>>

"benryves" <benr...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:4654C94F-D7EA-4963...@microsoft.com...

> I'm getting there with my battle against the album art. ;)
>
> By using a third party tag editor (http://www.mp3tag.de/) I can get away
> with embedding high-quality art in the tracks, and also not be limited to
> square album art. This is great, I can play the tracks in WMP and in the
> Now
> Playing "Album Art" view can see unsquashed artwork that doesn't hurt the
> eyes with ugly JPEG artifacts.
>
> Not so much luck with the library itself, though - as it insists on
> resizing
> all art to 200x200 (distorting the covers) and saving as extremely
> low-quality JPEGs. Given that album covers tend to have text on them, this
> is
> a bit of a problem.

>>> I have tracks that I had created myself (often ripped from cassettes or
>>> other sources) to which I had assigned non-square album art (e.g.
>>> corresponding to a book or cassette cover) and that is now squished in
>>> v11.

>
> I tried the obvious (show OS files, replace Folder.jpg with my own) but
> that
> soon gets reverted to the 200x200 version. Is there a way I can stop this?
> Some obscure trick to at least increase the resolution or JPEG quality?

>>>Windowsmedia considers that it *owns* folder.jpg regardless of its usage
>>>for folder customisation before WMP album art came along. It has exerted
>>>more and more control over this since v9.

>
> WMP11 Beta 1 supported non-square album art, and didn't reduce everything
> to
> 200x200 via the tag editor, so I assume there is some reason for these
> changes...
>
> Given the emphasis on browsing your collection via album art and the
> general
> aesthetics of the player with 11's official release, I'm a little
> surprised
> the album art is treated so unfairly. :)

Every square peg is being hammered into Microsoft's round hole for media
management.