this is a feature that has been IGNORED by MS.

take for example Apple, with their new iTunes and portable devices their artwork is 600x600 I believe.

here is Ian's Blog about this back in March:

Ian's Digital Lifestyle

Music thumbnails in Windows Media Center

Since upgrading to Vista, something has been bugging me when playing music. The problem is album art. I am using a 50" LCD and the album art looks very low res, I told myself I would look in to why the image quality looks so poor but I never got round to it.

Then Jason Dunn of Digital Media Thoughts posted an article called I'm Sick and Tired of Looking at Ugly Album Art where he highlights the problem of Ugly Album Art. He points out that the images used in the Vista version of Windows Media Center are low-resolution:

The problem is that the album art displayed is the low-resolution (200 x 200 or 240 x 240) highly-compressed JPEGs pulled from the folder, rather than the 600 x 600 lightly compressed JPEGs I have embedded in the file itself. The result is a badly pixellated image that looks quite bad on my 26” LCD TV. It's hard to show you how this looks online, but here's my best effort

He is not the only one that has noticed this problem on TheDigitalLifestyle.com forums slig posted Auto Resizing CoverArt is a NO, NO for M$!

I have been looking for a solution to this for a long time [the whole day] and have come to a conclusion that microsoft resizes ALL the artwork that is pasted in WMP11 to 200x200, no matter it the original size is; 500x500 or 1000x1000, still it will resize it to some crap quality art covers. IF you use VMC and you are viewing "Now Playing" you know the cover art is really Crappy. , 500x500 covers that get resized to 200x200 is a big amount and you might have noticed the pain, just to let people know how BIG of difference it makes here is a screenshot: [left is a 500x500 image, and on the right is the resized art in VMC]

You can see from the example Slig posted it makes a massive difference:

So can anybody suggest a way to fix this bug feature? In a HD word it seems crazy that Media Center is using 200x200 artwork even though the track may have hi-res images embedded in it

Published Thursday, March 08, 2007 9:28 AM by Iand

You can have hi-res artwork....

1) get rid of the embedded artwork.
As you point out MS have messed this up by extracting the embedded artwork as a 200x200 image and ignoring the hi res image you embed.

2) Add a high res image called Folder.jpg and place it in the folder containing the album tracks.
I also create one called Cover.jpg in each folder as a backup. The reason being if you have embeded artwork and WMP11 sacns your library it will extract and downsize the embeded artwork saving it as Folder.jpg in the album folder, overwriting your hi res artwork. That is why in point 1 i advise getting rid of the embeded artwork.

3) In Vista there is a bug which will only show Folder.jpg for the first track, so download and run this utility http://www.claydons.net/vmc/UrlToCoverArt.rar which will correct this problem for your library.

(Full story on the fixup utility in this thread http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/7/181255/ShowThread.aspx)

and thats it your done you have hi-res artwork for all your albums :)

 

 

 

wanna help me out with step #1? how would I delete the embedded artwork?

Use a tag editor... or WMP.

Using WMP you would open the library right click on a track and select 'Advanced Tag Editor' got to the Pictures tab and delete any artwork you find. Thats the principle anyway :)

Now its been a while so I can't remember if WMP can do mass removals of embedded art...

if not use a 3rd party app... i use ultra tag editor but there are many out there to choose from.

But to start with just use WMP to do one album and once you get that sorted with hi res loveliness you will find the motivation to do your whole collection.

Oh and once you have got rid of the embeded artwork and added your own Folder.jpg you might want to delete the various vista caches of artwork to force it to re-read in the artwork.

Delete the contents of these folders;

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\eHome\Art Cache

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player\Art Cache\LocalMLS

Ok here's the deal:

the method works, you dont really need the third step?

WMP opens the hi-res covers but hte Media Center doesnt =/ it reads like there is no artwork [even for the first track] am I missing anything here?

 

btw: a great resuouce for hi-res covers [600x600+]

http://www.jasondunn.com/albumart/index.html

Media Center should/will read in the new Folder.jpg covers... but you must clear out all the caches show above.

Even then you may have to go in and out of the the media center music library and scroll through your collection to give media center a nudge to starting reading the new artwork.

Also check all of your music folders for hidden system JPGs Folder, small album art, large album art filenames... if you find them delete them. In Explorer folder options select show hidden files and un-check hide protected operating systems files.

You do need to purge your collection of all these caches and hidden artwork files... so that all that is left is your lovely Folder.jpg files.

Step 3 is needed only for Vista Media Center not WMP11. 

However, if you ripped all your music to WMV or MP3 using WMP11 then you won't need to do step 3 but it is unlikely that all your rips are as recent as Vista WMP11.

If you have MP3s ripped using WMP10 or a 3rd party tool then yes step 3 is necessary. Normally the artwork only gets shown for the first track... but sometimes it may not even get shown for track one... but another track instead... but typically it will only show for one track on an album.

The step3 fix cures this know bug by reading through your library and recreating the UrlToCoverArt.dat file used by Vista MC... let it open the existing file read through your library and then save the results over the top of the existing UrlToCoverArt.dat file.

It won't break anything ;)

 

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!

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Noah Spitzer-Williams
Program Manager, Media Center

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

That is good news Noah... and while you are sorting out that... take the opportunity to jazz it up by perhaps supporting multiple pieces of artwork for the one album... you know front covers, sleeve artwork, back covers and other such albums extras... perhaps slow fades between art when more than one exists... using the various types of embeded artwork supported, or even perhaps multiple external jpgs... all of course at 500x500 or higher res ;)

 

 

This is good news as currenrly WMP and Media Center are infuriating when dealing with art work.

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Running: WHS & Currently Testing Windows 7 64Bit RC.

Thank You RB 1

great! and hopefully it will be an integrated thing. Meida center and for zune and everything by ms inbetween

noahsw:

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!

Thanks Noah, of all the issues/features that need fixed/added, this is a big one. In good ole' MCE with WMP11 this was not an issue. I maintain a master backup of my music library with 500x500 art and I guard it with my life after seeing the mutilation and destruction that Vista has done. As a former DJ, I have a vast collection of 12" vinyl mixes, not found on CD, for which I digitally captured and photographed their covers. One in particular comes to mind when I started using Vista. Can you imagine listening to a remix of "Disappear" by INXS and seeing artwork of Ella Fitzgerald? I don't have a clue how the metadata service matched that up.

Personally happy with 300x300 as you cant always get album art off the net at decent quality for old songs transferred from vinyl or just downloaded. Often downloaded tracks have the Album cover not the actual single cover artwork.

Ive gone into much detail how to tag on here before and advised to set read only shares to music folders (this then mucks Media Player up on some tracks but Media Center works fine but doesnt matter to a dedicated living room machine for MC).

I only use embedded artwork and the Media Player algorithm is just plain broke and was pointed out to the product group since BETA. Why do tracks with no track number display as "0" for example ? If there is no track number then just don't mention it on the UI in Media Center ! simple !

I would prefer no cache art files, and for MC to read from embedded at runtime OR create a ONE file cache that Media Player and Media Center use together (currently there COULD be up to two cache folders and multiple JPG's in each track folder which is complete mess and bad design).

Can we not set the cache to be on a ReadyBoost drive in future Media Player version ? This would speed the art cache up ?

I really beleieve that unless the next Media Player version is close to going beta et al, then MS should create a hotfix to fix the cover art issues for MP11.

Any news on this?

Annoys the hell out me as well, with a 50" 1080p screen, mymovies covers look brilliant, photos look great, yet music (what I assume) which people mostly use a media center for is crippled with 200x200 artwork that looks blurry as anything when there are 400x400+ jpegs embedded into the mp3 itself. grr :)

offtopic, why has wma still got a restriction on image header size.

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c2d 6600 | 2gb Ram | 7800gt Gfx | Vista Ultimate x86

I have my artwork embedded to the mp3 files. I also have a folder.jpg and AlbumArtSmall.jpg in each directory. All my music is organized so that I have read-only share with this structure on my Vista Media Center PC:
\\Music-share\<artist name>\<year> <album>\mp3 files.

I have Artist and Album Artist tag set to the same value for each respective mp3 file.
All tracks have Artist, Album Artist, Album, Track, Genre, Title, sometimes Comments and Cover.

Is there anyway I can force Vista Media Center to rebuild the cache for album art?
It seems VMC is pulling old version of album art and mixing it with newer album art of shows the generic cover until it updates the cache.

noahsw:

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!

With SP1 on our heels, can any authority figure comment on this issue? This problem has started to impact the public concept of how viable Media Center is. My case in point is that in our showroom, we upgraded to a 92" 1080p projection setup. Clients come and get the "wow" factor with HDTV content but when we show a music demo, those blotchy images are a turn-off. As an MS-OEM, I am to market the product with key selling points. So in this world of HD and big screens, where's my selling point here? It's been a year+.