# Problem with Album Art in Windows Media Player 11



## jump_in_the_fire (Dec 27, 2008)

I've had this problem for years, but have yet to find a solution. Every site I visit offers me no assistance, so hopefully this one will be a different story.
Anyway... I'm very OCD-ish when it comes to organizing my music. And when I rip a compilation album, I like to organize every track according to the album on which it originally appeared. Well, this all works fine and dandy, except for one little thing: Album Art.
I just use the manual copy-and-paste method (I update all info. manually) for album art. The problem is if I paste a piece of album art for one track, it goes to every other track that appeared on the compilation, despite each track now having its own information. However, if I just continue to paste the correct album art for each track (even though it'll overwrite the art for every other track), it'll appear correctly while in Now Playing. But the Library will continue to display the incorrect album art, along with my Zen V Plus MP3 player.
Is there any way I could remedy this? It angers me greatly. 
--Emma A.


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## stantley (May 22, 2005)

When you add album art with WMP it creates an album art tag that is stored inside the Mp3 file itself, along with other tags like Artist, Album, etc. But it also creates five other system files at the same time:

AlbumArt_{C1A1F059-B08D-4EB4-84A9-1B1369F8237A}_Large.jpg
AlbumArt_{C1A1F059-B08D-4EB4-84A9-1B1369F8237A}_Small.jpg
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
desktop.ini
Folder.jpg

The long string of characters (C1A...) is just an example, it's different for each album. To see the files you have to uncheck "Hide protected operating system files" in folder options.

Sometimes WMP uses the files and sometimes it uses the Mp3 tag, so if they're different that's where the confusion comes in. To find out exactly what's in the tag, use a tag editor, Mp3tag is a good one. You can also use it to manually update the album art tag. But if you update some other information for the track with WMP it might also change the album art.

All of the music software I've used is designed for one artist for the whole album, so compilation albums are always a problem. You just have to organize it the way that makes the most sense to you.

If you are "OCD-ish" about your music then I wouldn't even use WMP. Try MediaMonkey, it does a much better job of organizing your collection.


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