Digital Home Thoughts: Embedded Album Art: Microsoft Doesn't Seem to Get It

Other Random Facts About Album Art

• Windows Media Player 10 Mobile (found on Pocket PCs and Smartphones) does not display embedded album art whatsoever, whether it be WMA or MP3. Boo! MSN Music and several other music providers embeds album art in the audio file, so this isn't some crazy thing that only I'm doing.

• The smaller JPEGs that I'm now using seem to be OK with WMP10 Mobile. I embedded an 89 KB JPEG and the player didn't choke on it. No idea where the safe threshold lies and if I'll have problems with the JPEGs that are 150 KB.

• The Portable Media Center media player doesn't display album art either. It must be based off the same codebase as the Pocket PC/Smartphone player? It sure makes for a boring-as-heck experience on the PMC without the album art.

• Embedded album art is supported in the Vista shell. This means you get a great experience seeing the album cover for each and every song, whether you're browsing inside WMP 11 or using Explorer.

• The Media Center software client will first look in the folder for the album art, so even if you have nice high-res album art embedded in the file it will ignore it - unless there's no album art in the folder, in which case it will read the embedded album art (mine looks fantastic!)...but there's a bug in Vista that will cause the first file played from that folder to display no album art, but the second track will. If you skip to the second track, then back to the first, the album art will be read.

Now, as to why embedded album art is a superior solution to the "art in a folder" concept that is currently championed by Microsoft (this text taken from something I wrote elsewhere):

"I found the Microsoft method of placing the album art in the music folder to be very short-sighted because it only works properly in a specific set of circumstances. When I moved songs to another computer, the songs themselves had no album art. And because FolderShare (a Windows Live service) makes all hidden files un-hidden when it syncs folders, I ended up with thousands of JPEG images scattered through my music folders. Since I often access my music via Windows Explorer rather than the still-kinda-slow library of Windows Media Player 11, when I'd drag and drop the folder of music the now un-hidden JPEGs would come along for the ride and show up in my playlist and stop the music as they'd display. It was a complete mess. The same kind of stupidity would occur if I dragged over a folder of music to my Zen Vision:M - I'd end up with low-res album art on the device."

Embedding the JPG album art inside the audio file itself is a much more elegant solution. For me it really boils down to logic: would EXIF data for photos work well as a separate XML file sitting in the same folder as the image? Would WMP star ratings work well if they were in a text file in the same folder as the song files? No way...embedded is the way to go.

Come on Microsoft, wake up and smell the album art!

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He's a big fan of album art - can you tell?