Album art in my music

andy1249

Before Getting MCE I was using a program called Meedio , With meedio , Album art in my music was simply a matter of dropping the relevant JPG into the album folder.

I have the same setup for MCE , is there a simple way of getting MCE to use the jpg in the album folder as the album cover ?

Or do I have to go through all the folders and individually set up the album art?

I have tried the online option of having MCE find the art online , it is rubbish !!
It posted at least 50% of the albums with the wrong cover art , and could not find the rest.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

8T8

Check out Album Art Fixer it can search for the covers and correct them.

Their might be more similar apps out there. Amazon are also a great source of covers for music and DVDs if nothing turns up.

andy1249

Got Album art fixer , however with this , you search for albums that have issues and fix em one at a time ,Im talking nearly 2000 albums here , so thats a lot of time with this program ,

Does anyone know of a way to make MCE use the Jpg in the album folder as the default album cover ?
An simple option like search for album art in album folder ?

Meedio can do this , just a simple command , there must be an equivalent in MCE surely ?

karltimber

Have you tried doing a search in the other forums

www.thegreenbutton.com
www.xpmce.com

hope you find the answer -- and share if you do

8T8

Just to clarify as I'm not sure you want to drop in your own custom .jpg in the folder ?

From what I read elsewhere what you do is un-tick hide system & hidden folders browse to the album folder you should find two .jpg files one called Folder.jpg and the other called AlbumArtSmall.jpg, replace these with whatever you want to override the cover art (MCE must also be not running while doing this).

[Have not tried that myself]

Also came across another nifty program for downloading cover art and this one has a few good sources as well.

andy1249

Just to clarify ,
All my albums are in separate folders , all are tagged immaculately so all files are made read only in case WMP messes them up. (Which I am guaranteed it will if let !! )

In each folder there is a "albumname.jpg" with the album cover , this is my album collection as it stands , its backed up like this so I have room to experiment.

My HTPC has a folder called My music with all my albums in it ,each subfolder is an album name and in each folder are the tracks and the album cover. When I point MCE to this it finds all the music but does not recognise the jpg in each folder as being cover art .

My question was how to get it to do this automatically , note I do notwant to search online for album art , that service is terrible.
Once again all my album art is there already and is correct , I just want MCE to use it.

It would seem from the other forums that the jpg file in each folder must be called Folder.jpg , so it would seem that I have to physically go into each folder and rename the "albumname" .jpg to folder.jpg

This solution is about as quick as album art fixer , in that I must edit 2000 folders ,
Does anyone know a quicker way , is there by any chance , a way of batch renaming 2000 different jpg's to the same name ( but in different folders of course !! )

andy1249

There is a registry hack on one of the sites linked above that looks like it might do it ,
Are there any registry experts out there , does this look good ?

http://www.xpmce.com/forum/how-to-see-album-cover-art-vt98225.html

dalk

Hi,

Like you said, all you need to do is bulk rename the files to folder.jpg. Had to do this myself (as well as sort out the "album artist" tags as well).

Can't remember which utility i used but i would have looked here
for something usefull.

All you are looking to do is rename *.jpg (ie search for all jpgs in the music folder) and change to folder.jpg.

It can be done easy, just need to find the right tool.

andy1249

Thanks a million for that Dalk , one of those two programs in the link looks like just the job , should sort out all issues.

I will try it tonight and post if it works.

andy1249

Okay . I used the renaming program to rename all jpg files to folder.jpg in my music and had MCE search for them all again , it found all the rest of the albums but messed up the ones that were already done ,

I was kind of expecting this , so wiped the my music folder , copied over the backup so that we starting from scratch again , and renamed all the *.Jpg's to folder.jpg and had MCE search for albums again. I had disconnected the net so that it couldn't mess up.

This time all went smooth , and everythings is ok , just after flicking through all the albums in my music view and nothing is without album art and as far as I can tell they are all correct.

Now I have just made the whole of Music read only so that it cant screw them up again.

Alls well ,

Thanks for the help lads.

Smoggy

I have used a program called media monkey it uses amazon to get track listing , changes the ID3 tags to suit and downloads the picture ,where you save it in the directory called Folder.jpg.

Real easy and relaticly quick when you get the hand of it.

The problems come from having incorrect ID3 tags , anything from an extra space throws it all out of sync.

( sorry if this has already been posted as I skim read it )