How long would it take a programming team to sort this out? 4 hours? 1 day max?

I know its the MS way to make people wait ages and ages for fixes but it is getting a joke now why there is a list of 10's of 100's of annoyances that haven't been quashed.

Surely this annoys bill and his kids.

eh w/e but they are making media center a standalone application so they will NEED more ppl working on it since the demand will be greater and more users will use it therefore they will NEED to fix those issues.... again HOPEFULLY!

Just amazing this has not been fixed after a year+.

You have to think noone at the developerteam is acually using this software, because this annoys the hell out of everyone.

"We're well aware that this is a complete mess.  We're pushing to get much higher-res album art, but also to be more predictable if users choose to use their own.  Stay tuned!"

- We can all honastly care less if you want to predict if users want to use their own art or that you will create an automatic database of hi-res albumart. ALL we asked for is a little patch fix (prehaps a KB or a "Toy" of yours) to allow the orginal size to be displayed, just so w/e converts the image 200x200 doesnt convert it.

Im being really nice saying this the way im saying this. ooh btw there are now more fursturated users, many MORE. the topic is spreading around like a fake vista. heres a link to the newest topic with some 30 replys already!

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/241255.aspx

Check this compression beauty out...

microsofts known for WOW'ing its costumers =D

Any news about this issue??

This is dragging out way too long for something that should have been resolved before Vista's official release 14 months ago. It's beyond the point of ridiculous now. Noah, where are you? It was in October on this thread that you indicated signs of hope but now, the silence is deafening.

HighDef:

This is dragging out way too long for something that should have been resolved before Vista's official release 14 months ago. It's beyond the point of ridiculous now. Noah, where are you? It was in October on this thread that you indicated signs of hope but now, the silence is deafening.

I wouldnt waste your breath or energy on chasing this up - I think Media Center is dead in the water within the next couple of months unless the new update addresses a HUGE number of issues (bugs and incredible limitations).  Sorry to sound negative but the state of VMC is truly beyond a joke now - I genuinly hope MS has a fantastic update in the works but I fear this may not be the case!

I tend to agree with HighDef. MS does not seem to be rushing out with any solutions. I would speculate that they are working on a better way of organizing music, working with partners to get better artwork and provide a complete solution to customers. I would bet that the thinking at MS is that WMP should handle all of our music encoding, tagging and archiving needs. For us here at the forum that may not be what we want as - if you are like me - we prefer to keep track of our music ourselves and control how it's organized and archived.

Personally I have a palette of applications I use.

iTunes - to get high quality artwork. If iTunes do not have high quality artwork I will google for it or alternatively use my Canon 400D EOS. My LP covers look great once I've tweaked the contrast and colors and cropped the image and done minor repair to remove folds and scratches in the picture of the cover.

To get the artwork out of iTunes I use iTSFv. The tool has a ton of options but I mainly use to (a) extract artwork to album folders with folder.jpg, artwork.jpg, artist-album.jpg so I have backup copies and (b) add/remove files to iTunes as iTunes does not have a discovery engine to find new files.

For tagging I use mp3tag to ensure that Artist = Album Artist and to embed folder.jpg to the mp3 files. I also let mp3tag rename my files to that they are organized according to the actual mp3 tags in the files.

For encoding I use EAC with Lame encoder.

For recording vinyl albums I use good old Cool Edit Pro and tweak the recording with
Younglove's Decrackle Technique which I think works quite well.

To get high quality artwork shown in VMC I use UrlToCoverArt from
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/post/196728.aspx it's really fast and loads the VMC cache file and you can fix the existing album art and add new files. Just remember to save the new cache file once done. I've set the tool to use artwork.jpg from each directory.

I have all my albumart in 500x500 or 600x600 and my music is added to VMC via a read only share like \\media\music and then I have all my albums like \\media\music\artist\year albumtitle\mp3 files + folder.jpg, artwork.jpg.

- Chr

Now that big changes are amidst here at TGB, I think it's time to resurrect this thread and get answers to an aged problem that has been shamefully neglected. In our showroom, potential buyers of our media systems get totally turned off when we demo the music section of VMC. In fact, we only show it when we're asked to. It's quite embarrassing when you see the "wow" factor on peoples faces with HD content and then the room goes cold when cover art is displayed. Please Microsoft, can we get a grip here?

yes, now that the ms heads are here, hopefully we can get them to fix this issue, 200x200 = bad...i had posted this in another section, guess this was the right section. lets all hope on a fix.

It's quite simply a disgrace Microsoft didnt fix this years ago.

I hope MS fix this on Media Center 2008 Pack (Fiji), now I'm adding cover arts up to 850x850... I thinkthat cover size won't be a problem in the near future (mabe on Win7).

I also hope MS adds genre>artist>album view - If (I supose it is) it is a patent problem (all other players do not have genre>artist>album suport - Zune, Zen, Crown, Sansa - But Apple - Ipod does suport), please, please pay for the patent use.

Check out this similar thread, as Jeff Tucker has provided some details into this issue.