Groove does not display any Album or Artist Art

David,

I don't think that your MS Answer Tech was giving you the full picture. It's not quite true that the Xbox Support site is responsible for all things Groove. A long time ago, when we had the Xbox Music app, that forum was where support was driven from, but since Groove came about, that is no longer the case.

The Groove team (in particular, Ellen Kilbourne) does visit this forum, in addition to the Xbox forum. It's true that issues take a long time to get addressed (if ever), but that is the case for both forums.

I get the feeling that the Groove team is focused on the Windows 10 Mobile app at the moment, and the Windows 10 app is languishing. It may be the plan of the team to roll out the Mobile app to the desktop as well (assuming it's a Universal Windows App), and so no work is being done to fix long-standing issues in the Windows 10 app.

Hi, original poster here.

To all those that may still be following this thread after over six months without a genuine solution, I contacted the MS Answer Techs and questioned why MS has not joined in on the thread and provided some advice. And I know you Insiders etc have provided plenty of 'workarounds' which have satisfied some. But it remains that Groove cannot generally display the Album and Artist Artwork for which it is obviously designed. At the suggestion of the MS Answer Tech I will be raising this same issue on the Xbox Support site as apparently they are responsible for all things Groove. Just a pity they didn't monitor the discussions in this thread and provide that advice 6 months ago.

Cheers,

David

I'm a fan of MP3Tag and I've been using it for years. The steps provided are appropriate and worked for you when the cover art has been held in jpgs in the same folder as the music tracks.

Unfortunately they're of no use if, like me, all your artwork was already embedded in tags in the audio files.

There was a report in a blog last November which said the problem had been solved, at least for reading artwork from Flac encoded files. So I uninstalled Groove Music (using the powershell method) and installed it again from the app store. Unfortunately, I got exactly the same result as before.

It would be nice for the built-in app to work correctly, but at least there are alternative workarounds. I currently use Zune for playing music on my PC, and iTunes for managing my music on my Apple mobile devices.

Still waiting for MS to fix this.

I use MP3Tag as well, but couldn't get Groove to display album art on my old 1520. After my switch to a 950XL it suddenly works...

I'll agree with Jason's earlier comment. Previous implementations of Media Player and Windows Media Center filled up my music library with wonky image files that stored various sizes of album art thumbnails. Most of the time the files were hidden, but once in a while (especially when moving sets of files between PCs), they'd become visible, and whoa what a mess! I was also surprised at how much disk space they all consumed.

Groove uses the album art stored within the IDv3 tag instead. Now if you have a large music collection separated into folders with folder.jpg files, then I'd recommend using a tool like the excellent (and free) Mp3tag to batch write the album art into each file's tag. Here's how:

1. Download, install, and open Mp3tag.
2. Click File > Change Directory, select the top-level folder to search for music, and click Select Folder. The mp3 files will be imported into Mp3tag.
3. Click Actions > Actions. The Action Group window is displayed.
4. Click New, type a name for the action (such as "Fix Album Art", without the quotes), and click OK. The Actions window is displayed.
5. Click New, select Import Cover from File, and click OK.
6. Type a format string for the image filename (such as "folder.jpg", without the quotes), select a metadata tag for the imported image (I typically choose Front Cover), and click OK.

Note: If you already have album art embedded into some mp3 files, you can check the Delete Album Art option to prevent Mp3tag from storing multiple cover art images in the metadata. 7. Click OK to close the Actions window and click OK to close the Action Group window. 8. Mp3tag runs the action and displays the result.

If you no longer need the assorted folder images, you can also use Mp3tag to rename/restructure you library into a fresh set of folders and then delete the old ones. Voila!

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

I have huge music files & I use the Mp3Tag program to keep all artwork on my files. Groove  found Mp3Tag & now all music has artwork in Groove. Mp3Tag is easy to use & free to download.