Weird glitch with Music Album Art

[Fox-Shot]

I've noticed that my efforts to change them fail badly, have a look at this, it's pretty interesting.

For some odd reason, all those songs have the wrong album art (It's from a Grindstone Album, none of those are Grindstone songs.)

I believe that they are corrupted, since no effort to overwrite the album art in Media Player ("Update Album Art", "Find Album Info") have taken place, even when I confirm that's the info, I've unchecked read only, but it's still like that.  Anyone know what's wrong? 

[Showtime 1-1]

I've had this happen on iTunes. All the songs that don't have album art will one day all adopt the same cover, seemingly at complete random. Then, the next day, it'll be fine.

I think it has something to do with the program you use to play the files; maybe there's a tiny bit of code that was corrupted or didn't copy right, and it aliased one cover art to all files with a certain criteria.

[Fox-Shot]

I've had this happen on iTunes. All the songs that don't have album art will one day all adopt the same cover, seemingly at complete random. Then, the next day, it'll be fine.

I think it has something to do with the program you use to play the files; maybe there's a tiny bit of code that was corrupted or didn't copy right, and it aliased one cover art to all files with a certain criteria.

Well, the problem stayed after I upgraded to 7, I still haven't installed iTunes, I think it's dumb, and also, one time, iTunes just randomly deleted its library, even my payed-for songs.  And I can't redownload them because iTunes isn't like Steam.

[DZComposer]

Double-check your tagging. What may have happened is something is tagged "unknown" for album, but has art with it and your library program may have ran with that.

[Fox-Shot]

Double-check your tagging. What may have happened is something is tagged "unknown" for album, but has art with it and your library program may have ran with that.

Well it'd be nice if Media Player had the ability to edit tags.  It'll be a while to go into each file and name it, when regardless, it's still unkown, I don't know where some cds came from, and Media Player won't use the "Update Info" to do it, it'll say that it's updated, but nothing gets changed.

[DZComposer]

Don't expect pleasantries if you are using Windows Media Player. Get Winamp or something.

[Fox-Shot]

Don't expect pleasantries if you are using Windows Media Player. Get Winamp or something.

Media Player on Windows 7 actually does have a lot of extras for what it's worth.  I just don't want to mess with other programs since that's what caused the issue in the first place.

[DZComposer]

After some research, I found that WMP most likely caused your problem. Do you have hidden files visible?

If not, go to folder options and make them visible.

Then, go back to your music folder, and you'll find 2 hidden files named  "albumartsmall.jpg" "folder.jpg" I'm almost willing to bet that file is the wrong art in question, and when you archived your library, WMP happily applied the image to all of the art-less tracks in the folder. Playing ANY MP3 with album art in it in the folder causes WMP to write those files as that art.

EDIT: Actually, that's a little backwards. When WMP plays a song that has art in it, it happily assumes the whole folder shares it and writes it to those files.

Yet another reason to NOT use WMP.

Sadly, it writes the art to the file, so you'll have to blow it out manually using another program, like Winamp, because as far as I can tell WMP offers no way to manually change album art. I stand by Winamp. It doesn't muck with your files unless you specifically change them.

Automated things only save you time if you do your upfront homework, in the case of WMP, organizing your music in folders by album. Winamp will only do that if you tell it to. Otherwise, it leaves things alone until you change them.

[Fox-Shot]

After some research, I found that WMP most likely caused your problem. Do you have hidden files visible?

If not, go to folder options and make them visible.

Then, go back to your music folder, and you'll find 2 hidden files named  "albumartsmall.jpg" "folder.jpg" I'm almost willing to bet that file is the wrong art in question, and when you archived your library, WMP happily applied the image to all of the art-less tracks in the folder. Playing ANY MP3 with album art in it in the folder causes WMP to write those files as that art.

Yet another reason to NOT use WMP.

I had the hidden folder on, you might want to also mention the toggling off of "Hide Protected System Files" anyways, I guess I also need to delete the Album Art pictures of the songs in question?

[DZComposer]

I didn't realize they were POF's....

Yeah, I'd nuke those files. But wait until you change media players, because WMP will just put them right back as you play songs from there.

Note that it will not remove them from the song, however. You have to do that to each MP3 file. That will only prevent them from being written to new files.

In short, don't trust programs that automatically tag your library. Yes, they save time, but they also can do shit like this. Manually doing it takes longer, but the end result is exactly what you want.

I still have a bunch of mis-tagged files on my machine. To save time, I fix them as I want to listen to them.

[Fox-Shot]

I didn't realize they were POF's....

Yeah, I'd nuke those files. But wait until you change media players, because WMP will just put them right back.

Note that it will not remove them from the song, however. You have to do that to each MP3 file. That will only prevent them from being written to new files.

What should I go with, Because I was planning on just using Media Center or something, I don't like iTunes, or WinAmp, another assumption on why this happened is because at 1 point in time, I had iTunes, Winamp, VLC, and Media player installed at one time.

[DZComposer]

File association management is the key here.

I have:

Winamp

WMP

Windows Media Center (Not much more than a TV-friendly GUI for WMP...)

Media Player Classic

VLC

NeroShowTime

But, I let Winamp handle the common stuff, and the others for weird codecs that Winamp can't handle. Basically: set your file associations and stick with them.

I stay away from the Apple software because it wants to invade your media and take-over file associations. Plus, my apartment is an Apple-Free zone. No iPods, iPads, iPhones, AppleTVs, or Macs. Steve Jobs can kiss my ass.

[Fox-Shot]

I found a tag editor that allows me to mass-select and delete album art.  I'll do that, then move 3/4 of my music elsewhere to test the waters and see if Media Player has the stupidity to do it again, if it fails, I'll see what I can do after it all.

[DZComposer]

Dude, WMP WILL do it again...

If you want to stick with WMP, organize them by album in separate folders. And stick to that. It's a PITA, but it's the only sure way to keep WMP from messing-up the tags.

[Fox-Shot]

Fixed it, though the only way to fix it was to delete the actual ID3 tags, which doesn't matter as most of my files are named as the song, and most tags were just to add the album art.

Anyways, now to go on a hunt for a decent media player.