Hi guys, long time lurker, first time poster.
Here's the scoop; a friend and I have compiled a massive music collection over the years (4,000 CD's or so), and we have gone through every possible commerical product available to successfully manage it.
First there was Escient tunebase, then Audio Request, then Axonix, then Sonos and now the ubiquitous RAID array as a dumping point and MCE as the front end GUI.
We stumbled upon FLAC back in 2002-03 when Audio Request began supporting it as a space-saving alternative to WAV. So, every CD since then has been burned in FLAC since Request, Axonix and Sonos have supported it.
Now comes the quandry. So I installed the FLAC/Ogg Directshow filters and the WMP Tag Support Extender (the new version) and I can listen to all the FLAC files no problem. However, I can't get the cover art to display even if I cut and paste the 200x200 .jpeg into the album folder and I can't search for the albums within the artist.
When I search by artist, then I go into the artist parameters, and I indicate "albums by this artist" then I get a weird message "look in all songs for albums by this artist" and the only way I can play stuff is through an alphabetical listing of all songs by that artist. Not very conducive to playing one album!!
I am super grateful to everyone for giving me the insight into getting this far and I am hoping that I can finish this journey with a really cool music management solution once I tie the Crestron into the MCE!!!
Thanks a million,
Barry
two answers - first, take a look at the music library in wmp. You'll need to make sure the 'album artist' column is displayed, and that this data is filled in for every track. If you've only got data in the 'artist' column, you'll see the kind of behaviour you're seeing with searching by artist.
secondly - if you browse in explorer to the see the folders you store albums in, and switch to thumbnail view, do you see the album cover displayed for each folder? if not, you won't see it in mce. you'll need to right click each folder, choose properties, customize tab, and hit the 'choose picture' button. that should fix the album art problem
E.R.F.W.-
Thanks so much for the advice.
I did open up WMP to see what was happening behind the scenes and I did notice that the Album Artist field was indeed blank. That's going to stink to have to input the Artist in 40,000 fields. (I bet there's a faster way to do it.)
As for the cover art; I tried that very thing this afternoon and unfortunately it didn't seem to work. Coldplay; Parachutes was the example. I took the 200x200 .jpeg and inserted it into the Album as well as making it the cover of the folder through the process you mentioned. Consequently, the art appears in the basic windows 'window' but not on MCE. Then, I burned a new album using WMA lossless and the art was preserved!! Weird.
I'm not sure if MCE will behave correctly with the WMP Tag Support Extender, at least with regards to Album Art for FLAC.
What happens if you do a right-click Find Album Info or Update Album Info on a FLAC encoded album in WMP 10? Does it update the metadata and download the Album Art?
E.R.F.W.-
Thanks so much for the advice.
I did open up WMP to see what was happening behind the scenes and I did notice that the Album Artist field was indeed blank. That's going to stink to have to input the Artist in 40,000 fields. (I bet there's a faster way to do it.)
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there is - use foobar's masstagger and copy the artist field to an "album artist" field. might still take a while to process but it'll save a lot of manual labour
i'm not sure why you're still not seeing album art. I'd get the artist's fixed up first in case that has any relation to the problem. do you have each album in a seperate folder?
I'll give that a try on Friday and we'll see where we stand.
Thanks!