Hi everybody, I have the exactly the same problem in two different MCE machines, I can see the correct cover art on Album's view, but when a track is played a black box is display.

I did the following: I installed Dr Tag utility, and review the cover art embedded on each MP3 and looks OK, however it cant be display by MCE,  I deleted the all embedded cover art from each MP3 file with Dr Tag. MCE now displays the cover art when a track is played. 

Looks like MCE use one of these files, I test one by one deleting the others and MCE always works, displaying the file available.

-Folder.jpg

-AlbumArtSmall.jpg

-AlbumArt_{975C4526-8A13-4EB9-924D-992D1B297605}_Large.jpg

-AlbumArt_{975C4526-8A13-4EB9-924D-992D1B297605}_Small.jpg 

The solution is not nice, specially if you have a big library, the problem is the embedded images on MP3s, but is OK if you don’t need this images (IPOD need it)

JC.

dondi:

I'm getting a black box too all of a sudden instead of the album art when playing a tune & having VIEW COVER activated. Oddly though, when browsing by ALBUM, all the album art is there in that particular search view. The black box appears instead of the album cover for the song that is NOW PLAYING.

I also just recently installed IE7, and now that you mention it, I guess that is when it occurred, as all of the album art used to show-up just fine for the last 18-24 months or so.

I also peeked inside WMP10 to see what was goin' on and found some changes there too. Perhaps the latest IE7 install messes with WMP10 as well. I first noticed the dreaded Napster logo in the upper right, just near something that wanted me to select my online music store. I never noticed that before. Anyways, the weirder thing I noticed was when I went to ADVANCED TAG EDITOR when right-clicking on any random tune from any random album. I use TAG & RENAME to meticulously tag my tunes, and I also embed the album art into the files to boot. When I went into ADVANCED TAG EDITOR and looked under the PICTURES tab, the album art was there. I realize that MCE looks for folder.jpg in the album's folder, but it just still seemed odd that everything was still OK outside of MCE, yet I was getting a blck box instead of the art.

Anyone else getting a mysterious black box after installing IE7??

-- Dondi

I'm having the same problem, but I didn't put it together with IE7. That may indeed have been the trigger. It wouldn't surprise me in the least: Microsoft pushes something new on you and it hoses up something else. :(

Hi everyone!!

I have been working with WMP11 and Media Center and Media Center extender all day. We have a rather large music library that we have been trying to organize and have found that WMP11 is AWESOME! But then discovered had the same problem with album art,  Everything works fine in WMP11 but when songs played in Media Center most would have a black box for album art.  I finally discovered the issue, which you will be happy to know has nothing to do with IE7. 

WMP11 has an advance tag editor on it, I have discovered that if you click that to edit tags there is a tab labeled "pictures" if there IS a picture in this box then your album cover will NOT show.  Deleting this picture will not delete the actual Cover art that displays.  At least it did not on my system.     One I deleted the picture  listed under this tab the album art displays fine.  I have found that in order to delete the picture you must first be sure it is labeled cover art not user defined.  Every single Black Box" that I have tested has gone away once that picture tab is empty and my album art shows on WMP11, Media Center and the Media Center Extender.

Hope this helps!  It has worked great for us

This solution appears to work. Of course, with 10,000+ song-files in my media-center library, it isn't very practical to right-click, select the tag-editor, the picture-tab, and then delete one or more picture-entries for that file.

For those here proficient in writing code, you can download the Windows Media Format SDK from Microsoft to solve this problem.

There is an attribute-list that can be exposed using the object-model available in that SDK. If you iterate on your entire library-folder, and then do a search-and-delete on the "WM/PICTURE" attribute(s) for each audio media-file you discover while traversing the tree, it will restore the original album-art display shown in the MediaCenter interface.

Worked for me anyway.

Ok, has anyone ever figured this out without having to manually delete the embedded JPGs or re-attach your album art via Advanced tag editor within WMP11? I have a very very large library (~100,000) and manually doing anything to the entire library is not an option. I previously had this issue when it reared its ugly head when IE7 emerged and had been IE6 until recently. I upgraded to IE7 and the issue is back. Has anyone gone from IE6 to IE8 and noticed if the black box issue in MCE2005's Now Playing section is still an issue?

dondi:

Ok, has anyone ever figured this out without having to manually delete the embedded JPGs or re-attach your album art via Advanced tag editor within WMP11? I have a very very large library (~100,000) and manually doing anything to the entire library is not an option. I previously had this issue when it reared its ugly head when IE7 emerged and had been IE6 until recently. I upgraded to IE7 and the issue is back. Has anyone gone from IE6 to IE8 and noticed if the black box issue in MCE2005's Now Playing section is still an issue?

I just tried IE8 and yes, it does the same thing...I love MS sometimes!!!