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[benn600]

I started playing a song I ripped several weeks back.  I noticed tiny cover art.  Yikes!  So I started investigating.  Media Center overwrote close to 10 of my high resolution cover art files with tiny downloaded copies!  Thank goodness I have Shadow Copy.  I just searched for all my cover art files, sorted by size, and the ones where a previous version existed revealed the good copy.  So I restored the good copies.

Please examine this issue and resolve it because I don't think you want folder.jpg files being overwritten (ever), right?  The downloaded copies were very small and did not match what I physically have (and scanned)...which is the reason I scan it in to begin with.

Thanks!

[fitbrit]

Welcome back, Ben. The forum(s) missed you.

[MrC]

I see a number of my cover art files were overwritten as well, for albums I've not touched in ages.

[Alex B]

Did you guys import files from the same folder(s) to a new or old library. If yes, do you have the "Get cover art" auto-import option enabled?

It would be useful if you could try to reproduce the behavior with a few test files & folders and report.

Is it possible that someone used WMP11 for playing or otherwise accessing the files? When it queries online metadata it may overwrite old folder.jpg files automatically.

Personally I prefer to use the "Artist - Album.jpg" option (cover art in the audio file's folder). Somehow it makes me feel safer than the generic folder.jpg option.

[benn600]

Shadow Copy saves me so many times each week it's unreal.  Anyway, like I said, it only happened for a few of my files.  I was disappointed to see the new page on the installer...starting to feel like WMP.  Bugging me if I want to share info and have things done automatically.  I don't!

[Matt]

By default, Media Center will try to get art for files that have no art.  If it can not find art for a file, it will not try again for 30 days.

You can configure this in Options > Library & Folders > Get cover art.

Since it will only get art for files with no art, I'm not sure how it could overwrite existing art.  Is it possible you have lots of files in a folder trying to share one Folder.jpg?  Is it possible it was another program?

Any more details to understand (and reproduce) would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[MrC]

Matt - I'm trying now to track down exactly what has occurred, but reviewing my backup catalogs.

One thing is for sure, ALL my music tracks have been modified (their time stamps changed), and I've not changed them.  This of course caused my backups to explode (I have versioned backups), as 400G worth of FLAC files were re-backed up.

MC, starting on 3/18 at 5:54pm, starting updating my FLAC files.  The time stamps on the tracks show changes occurred several per second, and not in album order.  Perhaps it was either of these changes:

12.0.459 (3/18/2008)

6. Changed: Getting cover art and analyzing audio are enabled by default in auto-import options.
10. NEW: Reads and writes track replay gain and peak values to MP3 id3 tags that is compatible with several other players.

Can you confirm?  I'm not sure its a good idea to have MC running in the background updating every track - this has at large external impact as can be seen.

[JimH]

The date changes are probably the audio analysis running in the background.  A future build won't do that.

[flac.rules]

Yeah, probably I wise idea, I don't like the idea of any application by defualt changing my files automatically, I'm very picky about my files only beeing changed when I want them to (one of many reasons to stay away from windows media player).

[benn600]

As far as specifics...I only updated to the latest version on probably one desktop that has write access to the server.  But let me explain some issues.  First, I rip music and it has no cover art.  I never want the cover art to populate automatically here because I always end up scanning it in (usually in less than one day) and then I move it to the newly created folder with the music in it.  This delay could be causing problems.  Another issue is that multiple computers start out seeing no cover art and unfortunately, if another MC is opened when music but no cover art exists (yet) then it can create problems where I will have to manually quick find.

I should have looked at the date of the file I restored.  I'll see if I can figure out specifically when it occurred.  Strange because I was gone for 10 days so it probably happened right as I got home and updated MC.  I had just imported lots of CDs before leaving, though.

I have not experienced date modified issues with my backup strategy...in other words, my recent backups were not catching all my 350GB+ of FLAC so I don't seem to have a problem there.

[AoXoMoXoA]

Yeah, probably I wise idea, I don't like the idea of any application by defualt changing my files automatically, I'm very picky about my files only beeing changed when I want them to (one of many reasons to stay away from windows media player).

I strongly agree and ask you to Please avoid any changes to MC that will make it do so,and set no defaults so as to allow such.

[darichman]

One thing is for sure, ALL my music tracks have been modified (their time stamps changed), and I've not changed them.  This of course caused my backups to explode (I have versioned backups), as 400G worth of FLAC files were re-backed up.

Exactly the same thing happened here... I actually accused my brother of loading files in iTunes or something. Woops.

I'm not sure I like automatic changes either, especially if they can (accidentally or not) overwrite existing data. I haven't noticed any cover changes, but then again I haven't gone looking closely yet...

[benn600]

I switched from WMP because it would add all these hidden system .jpg files (Several files) and my directories were so messed up.  It was a disaster.  Granted this is simpler and cleaner...I still don't like it.

[Qythyx]

Silly question, but how are you investigating whick tracks had their cover art changed? I have all my cover art embedded in the files (mostly WMA), but as far as I know there's no easy way to see info about those images (like dimensions). Is there a trick for this?

[benn600]

We store cover art in a single standalone folder.jpg file instead of a copy in each song file.

[Vulcan]

Not the best solution, but you could make all your albumart read only.  This can easily be done in batch scripting.

Basically, you just have a script that sets all files in a certain directory named *.jpg to read only.  I actually used the opposite process before when I was trying to clean up a mess that Windows Media Player made.

Also: perhaps the devs could expand party mode into something that would be more suitable for leaving enabled all of the time as a means to protect from any unwanted changes.