Dale

This has been the topic of many heated threads in the WMP newsgroups -
mostly led by me.

The bottom line is that even though the whole Folder.jpg behavior is a
Windows Explorer feature, the Windows Media Player product team has co-opted
that feature in your media library and feel it is their right to replace
your Folder.jpg with their own at will.

Additionally, they limit your album art size to a maximum of 200x200 pixels
for the stated reason of providing compatibility with some unnamed portable
device that may or may not have even have ever been built and that you most
likely do not own. Then, when larger album art is needed, such as in the
album art view of MCE, the 200x200 pixel art is stretched to something
around 380x380 pixels completely distorting the image.

Should you ever run across the unnamed device that limits all users of WMP
on all other devices including huge computer monitors to 200x200 pixels, you
can about be certain that it won't work with WMP 11 (not even my real
AXIM-30 purchased in August 2004 works with WMP 11) but you can be
absolutely sure that it won't be the size of the album art that stops it
from working.

To replace your own private property with their own and without giving the
user any warning or notification that it was going to do so, and no way to
opt out, and not even create a backup first is, in my opinion, illegal and
is definitely a malware type of behavior. You could have spent many hours
creating your own original artwork to put in a folder as Folder.jpg
intending to use the long-documented Windows Explorer feature. There is no
way that Windows Media Player can make any association between existing
Folder.jpg and "album art". Your picture may have been anything you chose
for it to be. For Windows Media Player to just wipe that work out is
terrible!

A couple weeks ago, a poster in the WMP newsgroups asked for advice using
his own scanned images as album art in WMP. With good intent, someone
suggested the OP copy his scanned images to his album folders and rename
them Folder.jpg. My warning to the OP to backup first came just too late.
By the time he saw my warning, he had destroyed many, but luckily not all,
of his scanned images by simply naming them Folder.jpg and putting them in
the album folders where WMP could destroy them. So, the first lesson for
future readers of this, if it is not too late, is to backup your artwork
first!!!

Personally, I believe that the whole thing is nothing more than DRM. They
appear to be assuming that any images you use are stolen - probably from
some Internet site or other - and they are going to force what the record
labels agree that you can use for album art. What a huge waste of computer
technology - even on my 1280x1024 screen, a 200x200 pixel album art leaves
97% of my screen wasted in the Windows Media Player album art visualization.

"Extracampine" <lostfrogg@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:%23dYiScFTHHA.1200@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
> Windows Media Player 11 by default will try and retrieve album art
> (folder.jpg) from the internet. If it finds it, it will overwrite any
> pre-existing folder.jpg (even if the pre-existing one is a larger file) as
> well as create an AlbumArtSmall.jpg file.
>
> Having this as a default option is foolish, as the program began to
> overwrite my scanned-in high-resolution images with crappy low-resolution
> ones. Realising this, I searched the options for a remedy to this.
>
> The tools/options/library tab enables the user to switch off various
> "Automatic media information updates for files". Great, I thought.
> However, despite this option being switched off, Media Player continues to
> carry out this assault of my file organisation rather sporadically.
>
> Any ideas?