Revenge of the Chakra Artists - WMP Album Art continued
I returned to my Beethoven albums, and was dismayed to find that the album I had corrected earlier had reverted to the incorrect album art which WMP had previously downloaded. Not only had WMP downloaded a new set of AlbumArt*.jpg files, but it had overwritten the correct art I had saved as folder.jpg.
I reviewed my WMP option settings, which still say "Only add *missing* information" - not "Crap all over existing information". My theory is that album art is not properly included under the umbrella of "information" in WMP. The current state of documentation for WMP's album updates is this brief help file chapter:
When you rip tracks from audio CDs or when you copy other types of music files to your library, the Player automatically obtains related media information, if the option to update the music files by retrieving missing media information from the Internet is selected and your computer is connected to the Internet.
You can also manually add and edit media information.
Media information is stored in both the files and the Library database.
When the Player automatically retrieves media information, it may make the following changes to your files:
By default, missing media information is appended to any existing media information in your audio files.
Media information is added to the files in the form of tags. For example, the Player may add the following tag to an audio file: artist name=Beethoven.
Album art is added to files and music folders in your My Music folder.
The date modified is changed when media information is edited or obtained.
In addition, if the option to rename music using media information is selected, changes to media information in your files may cause the files to be moved to another location in your library; if the option to rearrange music using media information is selected, changes to media information in your files may cause the files to be moved to another location in the folder to which the files were copied.
This really does not suffice. It's a problem compounded by the wobbly terminology that permeates the entire WMP UI: references to "files" that really mean "some files", the ever-hazy Artist/Album-Artist/Contributing-Artist/Performer/Composer/Author jumble.
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I noticed that a couple of other Beethoven symphonic albums had been updated with identical & incorrect album art: album art for a budget label recording of the 9th (id={A4AD7803-D8FD-4CDA-AC22-22B7F6CB9B40}) had been affixed to a folder with a BPO/Karajan recording of same on Deutsche Grammophon, as well as a folder with multi-CD set of Beethoven symphonies recorded by Harnoncourt.
I did an album search and found that it correctly identified the Karajan set (although AMG insisted Beethoven himself was the performer, despite being dead for over 150yrs prior to this recording) . I corrected the details and OK'd the wizard. The correct album art {EE1E86D2-D9B3-4897-8114-234AC79E2882} was downloaded as several AlbumArt files, and overwrote folder.jpg. For some reason the old {A4AD7803-D8FD-4CDA-AC22-22B7F6CB9B40} AlbumArt files have been left behind. At what point would these be cleaned up? I deleted them manually.
I had a closer look at the folder with the Harnoncourt set of symphonies. It had 4 distinct sets of AlbumArt files, 3 sets of which seem to correspond to different sets of Harnoncourt CDs in this set, plus our friend {A4AD7803-D8FD-4CDA-AC22-22B7F6CB9B40} which also got to be folder.jpg and AlbumArtSmall.jpg. I deleted the spurious items and made a copy of one of the other files to use as a new folder.jpg .... let's see how long these ones last!