Extracampine

Thanks Dale for your excellent response. It is a very poor feature, and
Microsoft should pay for damages for loss of user's files.

I have circumvented the problem by not allowing WMP to access the internet,
by blocking the program in my firewall. This way it cannot replace files.




"Dale" <nospam@nospam.ever> wrote in message
news:%23UyK09FTHHA.488@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
> 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?
>