Prevent Windows Media Player Album Art Download

Anonymous
2009-12-02T13:24:14+00:00

I have spent a large amount of time fixingand manually editing my music album art with 500x500px images.

I have read the article at http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7music/thread/6ff8c9fd-d97f-4304-bad5-693f7dbb4532/ however this isn't my problem - I can add the artwork as I need.

The problem I have is that Windows Media Player is going online and replacing my 500x500px artwork with the 200x200px artwork from the online database. In addition to this, it is creating all of the 75x75px Small artwork files which are cluttering the My Music folder.

I have set Retrieve Additional Information from the Internet to No, and I have set Update Music Files by Retrieving Media Info from the Internet to No also, however it still goes online.

I used Wireshark to determine it is going to the following addresses:

redir.metaservices.windowsmedia.com.akadns.net

serviceswitching.metadata.windowsmedia.com.akadns.net

I have blocked these addresses on my router but WMP is finding a way around. I looked in the registry and there is nothing regarding totally disabling the artwork download (although this should be disabled with the options already set).

I can set the Folder.jpg files as Read-Only and this prevents WMP from overwriting my 500x500px files, but I still don't want it creating the AlbumArtSmall files.

Richard Green, MCSA Windows Server 2003

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Music, photos, and video

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Anonymous
2011-11-02T20:30:33+00:00

easy... just totally block windows media player using your firewall... or add those address as 127.0.0.1 (redir.metaservices.windowsmedia.com.akadns.net; serviceswitching.metadata.windowsmedia.com.akadns.net)

in the HOSTS file.

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-01-28T20:33:53+00:00

    jgt: the registry tweak that you applied prevents WMP from automatically downloading and creating any more of those album art JPGs. So if you still want album art, you'll have to manually add them, or use a third-party tool for automatic lookups.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-01-27T09:42:26+00:00
    1. The image files are not hidden
    2. I found new image for one of the albums saved it as Herb Alpert-AM Gold Series.png - still could not see it.
    3. Open the PNG in an editor and saved it as Herb Alpert-AM Gold Series.jpg - still could not see it
    4. Renamed it to Folder.jpg - now I see the image.
    5. Went to another album where I cannot see the cover, it has a jpg (not hidden) created a scond copy and renamed it to Folder.jpg - I cannot see the album cover.
    6. Repeated steps 2-4 now I see the cover however I had to changed the view from album to artist and back to album.
    7. Went to thrid album, copied exesting jpg image and renamed it to Folder.jpg - could not see the cover, changed the view from album to artist and back to album still cannot see the cover.

    It seems that I have to get a new image file and name it to Folder.jpg

    1. I'm not excited about finding a new image file for each album that has this issue, a rough guess suggest that about 22% of the albums have this issue and I have about 2800 albums
    2. I really don't like naming the image to Folder.jpg I would much prefer naming the image "U2-Seven.jpg" to identify the artist and album

    As a test I looked at the folders where I do see the album art and in a lot of the folders I do have the AlbumArt and Folder.jpg files and they are hidden. I was very surprised to see this and that my search tool "Everything" did not find them. BTW I turn on the settings so I see all hidden files.

    At this point I'm confused and I'm going to look for another player.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-01-26T14:17:04+00:00

    jgt: Please check if the folders for those albums still contain the album art as hidden .jpg files. For this, you may need to set Explorer to show hidden files and folders, and to show protected system files.

    If the .jpg file aren't there, you can manually place a Folder.jpg file with the album art in those folders.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-01-25T07:50:46+00:00

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences]

    "LargeAlbumArtSize"=dword:ffffffff

    "SmallAlbumArtSize"=dword:ffffffff

    that didn't work for me either, how can we find a cure for cancer if we cant display album art in a reasonable size in 2010. no album art much less joy, might have to go back to vinyl;)

    This did work for me, I had WMP closed when I added the two keys (I don't think this made a difference, later when testing I added the keys with WMP open and it worked). However this created another issue for me. For several of my albums I nolonger see the album cover in the main WMP window (I've selected Album in the navigation pane) but if I play the album the cover displays in the area above the play list.

    I looked at the tag info, using Mp3tag, for an album that did not display the cover in the main window to an album that display the cover and I did not see anything that jumped out as different. 

    I'm using Win7 x64, WMP 12. All of my music files are MP3 files with tags containing all the info about the music file as well as an image file. My music is a collection of almost 3000 albums that I have either ripped myself or received from friends.

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