The ultimate album art embedder for Windows Media Player - ambitious?

2011-02-09 06:18:01

Hey -

First, I am new to this site, so hi!

I use Windows Media Player to play and organize my music. I know, windows media player is not popular, but bear with me. It has a flaw that is common to all the popular media players: a shameful ability to embed album art into mp3 files. It displays art marvellously within the player, but this art is stored in hidden files named names like "AlbumArtSmall.jpg".

I've searched all over the web and there seems to be no solution to this problem yet. (I know you can embed the album art with Mp3Tag, but that embeds the Folder.jpg album art only, and since there is only one Folder.jpg per folder, you can't have more than one album image per folder - a problem for the way I sort my music.)

I see an easy solution to this problem. Windows media player classifies each album by a "CollectionID" windows media tag. Here is a screenshot of these tags using the "Tag Editor Plus" in windows media player:



So my bright idea:
1) Read the CollectionID tag from each of your media files
2) Find the corresponding album art file for each media file: it will be of the format %MediaFileDir%\AlbumArt_%CollectionID%_Large.jpg
3) Embed that jpg into the media file, removing any prior embedded art first if necessary.

If one were to write this script and run it every now and then, embedded album art would exactly correspond to album art displayed in windows media player -- not bad!!

But while I have computing experience, I haven't been able to do this by myself. Step 3 can be done with a tool like MetaMp3 http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=49751. Step 2 is easy. It's the first step that I'm having trouble with: Windows Media Player tags can't be easily read by Mp3Tag or any other tag interfaces. Microsoft tells you how to get them here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms...4(v=vs.85).aspx (and more help possibly here). This should be easy enough, but I don't know C/C++/C#.

Well that's all... any thoughts?

Thank you for reading! Good night.

The ultimate album art embedder for Windows Media Player - ambitious?

Reply #1 – 2011-02-09 10:45:46

This is interesting; I had thought in the past that a similar tool for iTunes would be useful.

The ultimate album art embedder for Windows Media Player - ambitious?

Reply #2 – 2011-02-10 16:22:18

Hi, I'm the author of Tag Editor Plus (and Windows Media Player Plus).

Tag Editor Plus doesn't read the WMCollectionID tag directly from the music files, but simply requests it from the WMP library, where it's cached. Tag Editor Plus uses the getItemInfoByType method from the IWMPMedia3 interface for this, but you could also use the simpler version, getItemInfo (IWMPMedia). These interfaces are part of the WMP Object Model.

However, I'm pretty sure that it's also possible to directly read the tag from file with a "metadata editor". You can create such a metadata editor with the WMCreateEditor function. Then, QueryInterface the metadata editor for IWMMetadataEditor2, and use OpenEx to open the file. QueryInterface the metadata editor again for IWMHeaderInfo3, and finally, use GetAttributeIndices/GetAttributeByIndexEx to read the tag.

Also, you might want to take a look at ID3 Album Art Fixer. It looks like it will do exactly what you want, but I think that it only embeds Folder.jpg files.

The ultimate album art embedder for Windows Media Player - ambitious?

Reply #3 – 2014-12-24 04:39:02

Hey I see this post has been inactive for a while so I'm not sure if the user ever found a proper solution. Any way, I had this same exact problem. I use WMP and was frustrated at the lack of embedding album art in batch form. I have 8000+ songs and I wish the album art taken from the AllMusic database was embedded so when I transfer music on my Android, the album art would show. I am happy to say that there is a solution. The program is called AV Album Art Fixer. I will provide the link below for download.

This thing is a miracle. Basically you load the program and it searches your entire Windows Media Player database, locates the WMP artwork for each indivdual song that has album art from AllMusic and embeds it for you! You can even do automatic processing so that the album art automatically embedded for songs that do not have embedded album art. Also it got 99% of the songs correct. Out of my 2000+ albums, AV Album Art Fixer only incorrectly embedded the wrong album art on 2 to 3 albums. 

Drawbacks are that I had to rebuild one playlist from scratch because of the sheer amount of songs the playlist had. It would keep freezing up both my MP3 player and cellphone where the program freezes. I would recommend after embedding the art to rebuild the library. It worked flawless for me after I did that and deleted my corrupted playlists. Well worth it though. The batch option saved me hours, embedded all my album art in 15 minutes (8000+ songs).

I hope this little piece of information helps for anyone still looking for a solution for a batch embedder that embeds WMP album art, especially album art derived from the AllMusic database which WMP uses.

Thanks.

Link for Description of Program: http://www.avsoft.nl/index.php/album-art-fixer
Link for Download: http://www.avsoft.nl/index.php/downloads/d...album-art-fixer