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[Irtelli]

Hello everybody, this is my first post here so excuse me if this is a noob's question.

I have just over 20,000 tracks imported in media center. Everything was hunky-dory until the last update (12.0.529) when about 10-20% of my cover art disapeared from both the 'display' and 'large thumbnail' views. However, when going to the 'missing cover art' smart playlist nothing is showing up.

I've always used mp3tag to embed cover art into my mp3's as this enables me to usually show album art on most media players. Upon checking the tags in mp3tag the album art is still embedded. I've also set the tags to write to ISO-8859-1 on ID3v2.3 under 'Write' in mp3tag after reading this advice elsewhere on these forums.

Any ideas on why media center is suddenly becoming so selective on what is chooses to show under album art? All embedded files are JPEG's although the size varies from 100 x 100 up to 500 x 500. I can't see any pattern to this.  ?

If this is helpful I'm running XP SP3.

[Alex B]

What do you mean by "display" ? Can you see still see the otherwise missing cover art in the main Playing Now display during playback? What does the Image File library field show when you check one of these files?

I don't know what happened, but have you tried to do "Library Tools > Update Library (from tags)" ?
If the files still have the images correctly embedded, as you said, MC should be able to reread the tags and create the missing thumbnails. Try a few files first.

[JimH]

I've always used mp3tag to embed cover art into my mp3's as this enables me to usually show album art on most media players.

That will work in MC.

Upon checking the tags in mp3tag the album art is still embedded.

Check the tag in MC.  Does the art show up there?

I've also set the tags to write to ISO-8859-1 on ID3v2.3 under 'Write' in mp3tag after reading this advice elsewhere on these forums.

No need to change anything in MC, but if you're writing tags with another program, that _could_ cause a problem.

Give MC a minute to build the thumbnails.  You can also force MC to build all the thumbnails.  It's under options/view/thumbnails (I think).

[Irtelli]

Thanks for your replies.

What do you mean by "display" ? Can you see still see the otherwise missing cover art in the main Playing Now display during playback? What does the Image File library field show when you check one of these files?

I don't know what happened, but have you tried to do "Library Tools > Update Library (from tags)" ?
If the files still have the images correctly embedded, as you said, MC should be able to reread the tags and create the missing thumbnails. Try a few files first.

By display I meant the 'playing now' display and also full screen. I've updated the Library with no joy. The image doesn't show up in the 'tag' box either. I've also forced MC to build all thumbnails. It can be very slow when updating some files along the way.

Also the tag box in MC says 'failed to load from inside file'.

I can only think that it's got something to do with my tagging program or even the program I used to rip in the first place. I'll get back to you if I find a solution.

[Irtelli]

I still can't work out what it is about these files that they won't display the album art. They work in both Winamp and Windows Media Player. Please don't make me go back to those.

[Irtelli]

BUMP! Please somebody help me. Could anybody tell me if the compression on a jpeg could be causing this?

[JimH]

Take a file that has the problem and do this.

Open the tag for a single file.

Click on the "cover".

Right click on the image and do Remove

Then try adding art from a different source.

Does that work?

[Alex B]

BUMP! Please somebody help me. Could anybody tell me if the compression on a jpeg could be causing this?

Here is a link to a test sample that you can try. The small MP3 clip in the zip package has embedded cover art. The file works fine on my PCs with MC12 and MJ12.

sample_mp3.zip (291 KB)

Try it first as it is and then retag it completely with your programs and try it again (remove all old tags and embed an image file that does not work for you).

If the newly added cover art does not work upload the file somewhere and post a link here so that I can examine the file.

If you don't already have web space somewhere you can use a free service like www.rapidshare.com or www.megaupload.com.

[Irtelli]

Thanks for your replies. I'll give those suggestions a go and get back to you. 

[Irtelli]

It's the weirdest thing. If I take the problem files into mp3tag, cut then paste the cover art into the cover art window in mp3tag the images then show up in MC. The image size also doubles when I do this although the resolution stays the same. It must have something to do with jpg compression or baseline / optimised or progressive compression when saving the image in the first place. When I'm cutting and pasting the image it's obviously pasting at a set compression amount. I'll do some tests tomorrow and get back to you.