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[Sandy B Ridge]

I have just spent a frustrating few hours rebuilding my HTPC after changing the motherboard. It failed a few weeks ago and I was hoping that I could just slot a replacement in and just reboot, but alas no...

My original motherboard was a H67, which my supplier tells me is now end-of-life and not restocking (another supplier claimed to have sent one, but it never arrived), so I bit the bullet and got a z68 instead. Unfortunately any attempt to boot led to a BSOD.    So I was forced to do something that I've been intending to do for a while, which is a clean install.

So, several hours later (Why do windows updates take soooo long?!) I duly reinstalled jriver and reinstated the  library (yes-all backed up!). Unfortunately, although all the metadata tags were present, the coverart was missing for about 40% of the music albums and 100% of the movies. I was dreading having to get the coverart individually for them again, especially since some I had to scan the covers as I couldn't find them online.

Anyway, I found them all in my backed up Users/Me/Appdata/roaming/etc folder under a combination of Media Center 15/coverart, Media Center 16/coverart, and Media Center 17/coverart. I copied the appdata folders from my backup into my new install, and all is well with the world again (it was missing a couple, but not the hundreds as before). I had to do a 'rebuild thumbnails' too to get them to show up.

Surely there must be a better way? I *almost* deleted the MC15&16 installations (including the appdata folders) a few weeks before I backed up, and I'm jolly glad I didn't!

Is there a global way of moving the appdata coverart to folder.jpg or amalgamate them all into one folder (that I have no chance of deleting!).

It took me a while to figure out where the art was and how to get it back, but nowhere near as long as it would have taken to manually search google for the images or rescan the CDs (dumped in the loft).

SBR

[Scolex]

You have a few options, go to tools/options/file locations and then select your preferred cover art location. I use "In a specified folder" and use D:\Cover Art (D is my Music and Documents drive) since it will remain intact during a new install of windows. Regardless of the location you choose after you have made you location change select all files in MC and use tools/cover art/save cover art to location specified in options this will create a new copy of all of your cover art. After the copies have been made and verified if you want to point MC to the new location select all of the files once again and use tools>cover art>quick find in file/cover art directory. If you have any files that list [Image File] as "inside file" and use quick find it will continue to use that unless you first remove it. I have the "Also store image inside file's tag" disabled so this is not a concern for me.
I also changed the location for Library Backups to be on this drive which get saved to D:/MC Backup

[Skogkatt]

Maybe not very sophisticated but storing cover arts inside each file allows me to maintain images permanently associated to musical files.
Even moving the collection of files from my HTPC to my laptop with an external drive allows me to see all cover arts for recently added albums instantly.
The (small) price to pay is having a negligible size increase for each file: I try to keep cover art size down to 100-200 kB so that even a 30 tracks album
requires no more than additional 6MB of additional space.

[Sandy B Ridge]

@Scolex

Thanks. I figured it would be something like that, but it's easier to ask on the forum from someone who's done it! I had a quick look for the [image file] location tag, but couldn't immediately find it. I was a bit rushed at that stage of the evening though. I'll look again for it tonight.

@skogatt

Thanks. This wouldn't work for my movies, only the audio albums. I do have some albums (I guess about 60%) that have embedded coverart in the filetags from dbpoweramp. The rest I mustve got manually.


Thanks again folks. Just seems messy to have the coverart in depracated folders.  I'll have a tidy-up tonight.

I seem to have renamed my 3rd HD partition by a different letter too when I reinstalled, so half my files haven't appeared when I reinstated the library. Is it easy to open the library backup file to see what it was (I've forgotten!)? I guess it is easier to rename the actual drive to the original drive letter than try and rematch all the files in the library backup to the new drive letter? I'd like to keep it simple!

SBR