I have my Vista MCE running, but there's a problem with my library. First let me tell you that my music library has functioned flawlessly in mce 2005.

My music setup in 2005 was as follows:

folder with tagged mp3's and one folder.jpg which would show the album cover. But also while playing a song from that album, mce 2005 would display the album art from the folder.jpg.

In Vista MCE, the album covers show up in the my music main menu (when for example sorted on ALBUM),  but... when I play songs from that album, only the first song has the corresponding image from the folder.jpg. All the other tracks don't.

Anyone else got this problem and preferrably a solution? :-)

The other issue I've got is that when I search on artist name, only the artists of which I have a full album appear. From the albums with various artists, the names don't show up.

Let's say I have 50 "full"albums of different artists and 1 album called "top 100 of 2006" with 100 different artists.

So 51 albums and 150 different artists. When I search on artist name, I only get to search the 50 of which I have the full album...

This was also not the case with MCE 2005. Every artist could be found.

Anyone got a solution.

I do not have Vista installed... but I had tried once some of my songs on a PC with vista of my friend.. and it all worked well

Try this:

- There are two tags that should be "filled up"..- Artist "tag" and - Album Artist "tag"

You can see those two tags on the "WMP tag editor"

- Always tag the Artist "Tag" on every album

- If the album have only one Artist, make sure the Album Artist "tag" have the same name

Ex. Artist Tag: UB40 - Album Artist Tag: UB40 (do this to all songs from the same album)

- On compilations like soundtracks or that album that you have told (Top 100 of 2006).. use Artist Tag, but let the "Album Artist""tag" blank do this on all the songs of the compilation. (be sure all the songs of the album have "Album artist"Tag blanked.

Than make a sistem refresh... and telll me if it worked.

Ps. I'm not that good in writing in english - I'm in Brazil and we speak portuguese here.

And Im waiting january to buy a new PC for Vista MCE

 

I have same problem - worked without fail in MCE2005 and Media Player 10.

Got ALL meta data tagged. All cover art is embedded as jpg inside each MP3.

Got a FOLDER.JPG in each folder so that MCE(2005) could read it and use that as the cover art when in ALBUMS view in Media Center.

Media Player 11 came along and destroyed that.

It tries to create an album art cache by taking random cover art from an embedded cover art in one of the tracks in a folder and then creates additional JPEGS and overwrites Folder.jpg - often with smaller and more compressed versions.

Ive found under MC in Vista that even deleting both Media Player 11 and Media Centers album art cache just recreates it. Im getting results like CC LEWIS cover art for an FPI PROJECT album cover view. If you delete the cache for Media Player 11, then Media Player 11 operates correctly until you do a library rescan or a new user account gets created and you scan a folder. With the Media Center application however, it will always try to recreate a cache.

Its definately without question a bug. Ive even tried an experiement whereby each song is in its own folder and the album name is the song name and it still messed up the cover art in ALBUMS view.

The way my data is organised is:

Every song goes into an artist folder, ecah with its own embedded cover art and ONE Folder.jpg that depicts the folder as a whole (normally a generic picture of the artist with their name but no mention of album name or song name on it.).

eg

Alanis Morisette > Ironic.mp3, Head Over Heels.mp3

Alisha's Attic > I Am I Feel.mp3, Alisha Rules The World.mp3

I like going into ALBUMS view, seeing the cover for that artist and know that when I click the album cover I then get a list of all songs by that artist rather than having it split up into album names. I've even tried as experiment doing it the album name way and it still f***s up the cover art!!!!!.

Every single track has been edited to have correct meta data etc.

Theres also other bugs in that track numbers are blanked out. Media Player 11 and MC Vista cant handle that and display as track 0 when previous version left them as blank. Track numbers are not necessarily relevant in digital age and are a personal setting. I prefer not to make use of them as they are meaningless.

At least Microsoft have sorted out taking one of the RELEASE year meta data here in the UK. MP10 would take a year off eg 2005 became 2004 after a libray rescan or would sometimes change to blank!

Perhaps a support call logged via an enterprise agreement got that one finally escalated and fixed!

I also seem to be unable to refresh the album art in Vista MCE. I can refresh the wmp library but the album icons stay the same. I know this because I had one faulty cover, which was half good, half graphic garbage.

I have tried to delete the specific folder.jpg and replace with a good one. In WMP it shows the new good cover, but in MCE it does not. Still the first (half good) one shows up.

In short. Can someone try to replace a folder.jpg with a different one and have it show up not only in WMP but also in MCE?

Reinout X:

In Vista MCE, the album covers show up in the my music main menu (when for example sorted on ALBUM),  but... when I play songs from that album, only the first song has the corresponding image from the folder.jpg. All the other tracks don't.

I have the same problem.  Does anyone have a solution?  All of my albums are tagged perfectly and every album has a folder.jpg.

Hi

The solution, try this soft "TagRename33.exe" Tag & Rename http://www.softpointer.com/

Quake forever

I already have tag&rename.  It isn't my tags.  They are perfect.  Does anyone have any other idea why media center only shows album art for the first song of each album?

The only solution I found -and it can probably be done by tag&rename- is to use the advanced tag editor of wmp11 and then on the picture tab insert the folder.jpg. Make sure you select all files before clicking right to enter the advanced tag editor. To all of the files in that folder, the folder.jpg will be added.

Maybe it's not the solution you want, but it works, and you only have to do it once, because the picture data is then stored in the mp3 file. At least that's what I hope

Reinout X:

The only solution I found -and it can probably be done by tag&rename- is to use the advanced tag editor of wmp11 and then on the picture tab insert the folder.jpg. Make sure you select all files before clicking right to enter the advanced tag editor. To all of the files in that folder, the folder.jpg will be added.

Yea, I don't want to do that.  I have spent hundreds of hours ripping my cds and perfecting the tags; getting they exactly as I want them.  I don't want any program to change them in anyway.  So much so that I have set my entire collection to read only because I know some programs just love to change your stuff.  Is MCE one of those programs?  Could that be what is causing the album covers not to show?

Make sure that you have set BOTH media center AND WMP11 to NOT download additional information for media files, or you will have the issue with WMP editing your tags and album art. Also,  you can try deleting the WMP database file itself, instead of deleting stuff from the Library (which keeps some info cached even if you delete items). Do a search for currentdatabase.wmdb and delete it. Then read your files to the WMP library.

Also, remember the way WMP 11 now works, it will add EVERYTHING it finds to the relevant category. It will add those folder.jpg s to "My pictures", etc.. So you may need to go back into WMP11, look at the media types by folder, and remove those from the library if they annoy you. If you have time, you COULD embed album art into each mpe, it should only make each mpe 50-100k bigger. And then make sure you add individual, discrete folders to the library (all mp3s in one folder, all pictures in one folder, etc)  instead of simply adding the entire C drive (like i did a few times..lol)

Once everything is set, they go ahead and set everything to read only :)  Thats what i did to all my video files and MP3s. I left the pictures editable in case I have to rotate a picture from within MCE.

Reinout X:

The only solution I found -and it can probably be done by tag&rename- is to use the advanced tag editor of wmp11 and then on the picture tab insert the folder.jpg. Make sure you select all files before clicking right to enter the advanced tag editor. To all of the files in that folder, the folder.jpg will be added.

Dracko:

Make sure that you have set BOTH media center AND WMP11 to NOT download additional information for media files, or you will have the issue with WMP editing your tags and album art. Also,  you can try deleting the WMP database file itself, instead of deleting stuff from the Library (which keeps some info cached even if you delete items).

I'm in agreement with both statements..... In my opinion, if you are properly tagging you're music you are adding/embedding the folder.jpg to each and every MP3.  Also, make sure that WMP is not overwriting your hard work, by collecting additional information.

Ok, I think I see the problem, as I just ran accross it.. The first track shows the album cover and subsequent tracks show the musical note icon, right?  I have run accross that on albums where the folder.jpg is either too big size-wise or dimension size.  As a measure, I have started resizzing all my album covers to 500x500 , the size that the windows automatic album covers are. Those with this size always show the album art on every track. The high quality, 1 mb+ scans are hit and miss.

 

Try that with just one  folder and check the results. If it still doesnt solve it for you (it did for me), then you can think about embedding the picture into each mp3, but that would be a pain in the butt to those of use with big collections.

I also found these... Don't know if they have complete relevance, but....

http://mediacenter.mattgoyer.com/2005/01/21.html

http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/archive/2006/11/01/237537.aspx

I've been messing around with this trying to get mce to show the folder.jpg album covers for all songs on the album.  I haven't got it to work yet.  Here is what I have tried:

As everyone has suggested, I tried embedding the album art into each song of an album.  This worked, but I will not be doing it.  Folder.jpg should work.  I would rather change media center software than embed my mp3s with album covers. 

I deleted the entire folder that had the wmp database and art cache.  This didn't do anything.

I tried all different album cover sizes.  The size did not matter.

If I add a various artist album and then view albums by 'album artists', when i view the various artist album the album art will show for the first song by each artist.  If the album only has one song by each artist then every song will show album art.

If anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them.  I really want to be able to use vista media center, but if I can't fix this I will probably have to switch to something else.

Thanks

I'm in the exact same situation as ArnoldTPants.
I have spent a lot of time correctly tagging my music, and i've got it set up so it works in windows, and in MCE 2005. But vista just doesnt play ball.
I refuse to go through each of my songs and add the cover... way too time consuming, plus i shouldnt have to.


Hopefully with vista launching to the public soon, someone might figure this one out.