Comments on: Black album art

By: Nat

Nat — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 02:16:39 +0000

bearb’s solution as well as the solution to change the art to the “illustration” type in the mp3 header only works because MCE doesn’t notice the album art in the mp3 anymore. The problem lies in media center’s desire to show embedded art and its failure to display the found art. The other hidden files in the folder have nothing to do with it and changing the type is only hiding the symptom not fixing the problem.

By: bearb

bearb — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:58:56 +0000

Forgot to say that I used “AV Art Fixer for WMP and MCE” http://www.avsoft.nl/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=80&Itemid=4 after file deletion to embed the art.

By: bearb

bearb — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:55:21 +0000

OK found this site since I had the black cover and no covers problems within MCE. From reading here and a few others and a lot of testing I have found a solution that is working fully for both MCE and embedded art for iTunes.

Within your music folders the only hidden file that you need is the “Folder.jpg” and that should be 200×200, delete all the other hidden files “AlbumArtSmall”, “AlbumArt_{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}_Small” and “AlbumArt_{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}_Large”.

This has worked for my entire collection

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:53:57 +0000

I went the Media Monkey route, deleting all of the hidden album art, folder.jpg, etc. files by hand, then using media monkey to get new art, then updating.

So far, so good (one week, none have changed back) but we shall see. Media monkey is very very nice. And free for this purpose.

By: BlueLudeDude

BlueLudeDude — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:05:22 +0000

I was having this problem with the art for one of my album covers as well. The solution that worked for me was to open up Windows Media Player 11, right-click do a “Find Album Info” on the problem album, and ensure that I chose the correct album details in the ensuing prompts. At this point the album art still appeared black until I clicked on the “Library” dropdown menu and selected “Apply Media Information Changes”. Problem solved (in WMP and in the Zune software).

FWIW, I’m running Windows Vista w/ WMP11 and IE7.

By: Muddarra

Muddarra — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:56:50 +0000

Anyone tried IE8 Beta to see if the problem has been fixed ?

By: steve

steve — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:58:30 +0000

I did the media monkey thing as well, on a completely new install of Vista. So far, so good.

I think that it has already blacked back a couple albums, however.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:35:20 +0000

Just went back to XP from Vista, and now I’ve got this same black album art problem. Guess I’ll take IE 7 off for now, but it’d be nice (and about time) for a fix for this!

By: Anthony

Anthony — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 22:56:49 +0000

Has anyone tested if Windows XP SP3 fixes this issue?? If not then I give up on this issue forever. Means I will never upgrade my MCE machines to IE7.

By: Randalll Lind

Randalll Lind — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:17:43 +0000

MCE 2005 sucks for music anyway. It is good for watching movies about it.

Using the standard WMP 11 is better for music.