Prevent Windows Media Player Album Art Download

Due to the age of the thread, please create a new post at the link below for assistance. Be sure to include as much detail as possible about what is happening and what you have tried.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/sound

I'm having this same issue.

Even tried blocking WMP from windows firewall but somehow its still updating with album art.

I don't want ANY album art at all as i'm using sugar sync and it's going ahead and backing up all the hidden albumart files also which is a real pain.

I give up, will try out winamp again, havnt used that player in about 10 years.

For Media Center users:

I have found the only solution for me is:  Don't use the Music library at all.  Just add an empty folder to it, nothing else (the same with My Pictures.)  (Don't put your music into WMP either! Use another player.)

In addition (for Media Center users) try renaming mcglidhost.exe and ehvid.exe to ehvid.ex_disabled -- in C:\Windows\ehome.  You'll have to take ownership of them first and then change the security for Administrators to Full Access.  You may also have to change the copies in the Windows\winsxs folder (do a search in C:\windows and you'll see them.) If you don't know what I'm talking about don't try this fix.  It's dangerous.  You'll have no thumbnails in Media Center, (but who needs them with List View)!

This stops WMP from scanning for thumbnails and much of the data.  It also stopped wmplayer.exe from starting in the background by itself (seen in the Task Manager.)

Background:

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I am using Media Center and I have no choice about WMP12 being it's primary backbone.  It even loves to scan my TV recordings and create little playlists and thumbnails in it's database.  On top of that it added pictures from my browser-cache to the MCE screen saver slide show!

Every time I test the library, by adding some folders, my computer goes into a scanning frenzy and slows down to a snail's pace.

The read-only file trick won't work because I want to delete them. I don't want 11,500 extra files on my computer (600MB).  That's why I embedded the album art!

The firewall fix won't work because, on my system, it's not downloading this stuff (see my other post earlier.) I also need to download TV guide data from Microsoft so I can't block it.

Disabling the libraries is a shame because Media Center can do some really cool things with them (streaming your music to your smart phone!)  Oh well.

Hoped this helps someone.

I confirm this problem for Media Center (not Player) too! (Win7 SP1)

I simply added music files to library with Media Center.  A few days later there were 300mb of new files in my folders!  These files don't seem to be downloaded.  They were picked up through a scan of my music's embedded album art (they are the same pictures.)  (I have NEVER opened Windows Media Player accept 1 time to disable Internet connected features.)

In addition, Media Center scans and replaces them again each I go back into the Music tab.

Finally, it also archives and compresses them again (another 140Mb) along with old databases (130Mb) in C:\Users%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player\

This is hogging precious resources on my system!  Thousands of small .jpg files make the hard drive very slow. Extracting them from large a music collection requires incredible cpu power that I can't spare.  No fixes I've tried have worked.

-Feeback sent to Microst as well.-

Please fix this problem!