Media Player and Zune database ? | The Coffeehouse

cro

I've bough the Billy Talent III album and I'm surprised that Media Player and Zune can't find the album art. How does it work ? Is the information provide by end users like CDDB ?

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

How did you buy that album?

cro

In reply to PaoloM

#Jul 23rd @ 3:01 PM

The old way, I've bough the CD.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

AFAIK, they get this stuff from AMG, and AMG doesn't have the album art for it when I go to their website and search for the album. So that's why Media Player/Zune can't find it. I have no idea where AMG gets this data, I assume just from the labels themselves.

You can add the album art by hand by copying the image and pasting it into the thing that says "Paste album art here" in the Media Player library, but be aware that Media Player is really annoying about saving stuff to it's own database and not to the tags in the MP3/WMA files themselves.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to Bas

#Jul 23rd @ 4:22 PM

AMG used to be good, back in WMP9 where the "Information View" gave you actually useful information, like lyrics and reviews and (at the time, high resolution) album artwork for pretty much my entire library.

Yet come WMP10 they killed that off and now we get to look at adverts in WMP. Nice one, Microsoft.

This is one of the areas where iTunes is superior, and I don't see Microsoft helping the situation.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to Bas

#Jul 23rd @ 4:22 PM

You can add the album art by hand by copying the image and pasting it into the thing that says "Paste album art here" in the Media Player library, but be aware that Media Player is really annoying about saving stuff to it's own database and not to the tags in the MP3/WMA files themselves.

WMP saves changes like that directly to the files in batch mode.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to W3bbo

#Jul 23rd @ 4:59 PM

I wondered about why there are no high resolution covers, so I went to the guy who owned that area and asked him Smiley

As usual, there is a reason. While WMA and MP3 have the ability to store high res images, there is a baseline spec that most device manufacturers have implemented. This baseline spec calls for 200x200 pixels for cover art, max, and these devices would flat out crash if the size of the cover art was larger than that.

Now, one may wonder, how many devices are around that play WMA/MP3 and are not updated often?

Think car stereos Smiley

Red5
Systems Manager Curmudgen

In reply to PaoloM

#Jul 23rd @ 6:10 PM

I did not know that.

I've been embedding something like a 500x500 or 600x600 in all my individul mp3's, so I get the cover art no matter where I play them. I was thinking if I had a poker gathering and wanted to display the cover art on my comp or TV, the higher the resolution, the better.

So far, everything i've played them on has displayed them properly. (Zune 80G, WMP vista, Insignia player, and few others). They even played in my old JVC car stereo before I sold the car last year.

Of course I use to this embed them, and find all my album art with this

EDIT: that explains why when I replaced the existing cover art, I never saw anything over 200x200

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

http://www.discogs.com

Most any album is in here...and album art too. I think in WMP you can just go to the album info interface, and drag the album art onto the blank album art in WMP, and it should update the mp3.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to PaoloM

#Jul 23rd @ 5:47 PM

What is this batch mode of which you speak?

Also, the bit about the car stereos is interesting. I have a bunch of MP3's and WMA's that my car stereo simply skips over as if they don't exist. I wonder if they have massive album art or something.

Yet come WMP10 they killed that off and now we get to look at adverts in WMP. Nice one, Microsoft. This is one of the areas where iTunes is superior, and I don't see Microsoft helping the situation.

What? I don't see any ads in WMP.

AndyC

In reply to Bas

#Jul 23rd @ 11:24 PM

Bas said:
What? I don't see any ads in WMP.

WMP10(?) had an online store button which showed the company logo (depending on where you are it was a different service IIRC). Of course this has long since disappeared from WMP, but W3bbo is still complaining about it because he refused to upgrade because it was there....