Prevent Windows Media Player Album Art Download

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.

[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.

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.

This only worked for a few minutes. I double-check my firewall settins and WMP is still blocked, and I did add the suggested lines to my HOSTS file.

I have a 2000 CD collection ripped in WMA lossless. After ripping a ripping session, I would spend considerable time cleaning it all up. You know editing artwork, album titles, track names, etc. Then WMP willy-nilly follows me around and screws up most of my changes.

You can uncheck "Retrieve Additional Information from the Internet" but WMP will still run around trying to screw up some of your artwork. If WMP can't find any info on an album online, or maybe, if you changed it manually, the metadata ends up getting set to all zeros, like this, AlbumArt_{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}_Large.jpg. These files are hidden in the album directory, BTW. Then WMP will take a random one of those from somewhere and copy it everywhere else with {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000} metadata totally screwing up hours of work. This was really **** me off! There is no way to fix or stop it!

See more here for more here:  Link

Anyway, only solution, for me at least, was to go out and buy MediaMonkey. I pointed WMP to a complete different directory and never use it anymore. Never let WMP touch your library again or it will go around changing these things on you again. If you insist trying, make a good backup first. I suspect the W8 Music App is the same way since it appears to be tied into the WMP API like Media Center is. So don't let it touch your library either (without a backup) because it will probably do the same thing!

With MediaMonkey you can edit and change things to your heart's delight without it messing with you. There is a learning curve to MediaMonkey and you have to make some setting changes before you do an "Auto-Organize". But once you get use to it you will never go back to WMP. Start small with MediaMonkey, like 10 CDs, make a backup, then experiment to learn everything and tweak various settings. I tweaked my MM settings to keep the WMP album format since that was what I liked best.

If Microsoft ever fixes this issue, or gives us an option to turn this "feature" off, then WMP would be a fine program that I wouldn't mind using! But as it is now, it is completely unusable for me. Only reason I revisited this is I was considering trying the W8 Music App and kind of forgot about the artwork issue with {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000} metadata.

It takes me like all night to copy my library to a separate drive for a backup. I got better things to do than be a guinea pig copying it back and forth experimenting.