Onlydarksets

Turns out the Zune 2 software won’t autotranscode WMA Lossless to WMA lossy for you. Sooooo, I have to convert my entire library, and then use that with the Zune. Not a huge deal, except for the fact that I used WMP11 to associate album art with each of my tracks. Why is that a problem?

Well, it turns out that WMP11 doesn’t actually embed the album art in the WMA file – it creates a series of JPG files in each album folder that it marks as Hidden/System. Yes, that’s right – art for each track is stored at the album level, so if you move a track to a different folder, you are hosed.

So, I’m going through the process of embedding album art for all of my tracks. Basically, that consists of:

1. Deleting the Hidden/System files.
2. Figuring out which WMA tracks (or MP3, AAC, etc.) don’t have embedded art already.
3. For those tracks, finding and embedding the art.

Deleting the Hidden/System Files

WARNING: This will affect not only the files in the current folder, but also in ALL SUBFOLDERS. PROCEED WITH CAUTION!!

NOTE: I suggest backing up all of the “Folder.jpg” files first, just in case you can’t find the album art again.  Do that between steps 2 and 3.

1. From the root of your WMA folder, type:
   dir *.jpg /A /S
   This will display a list of all JPG files in all subdirectories. You should see some (or all) of the following:
   1. AlbumArtSmall.jpg
   2. Folder.jpg
   3. Album*.jpg
2. You can’t delete or move the files until you remove the Hidden/System attributes. The following command will do that for the current directory, and all subdirectories:
   attrib -S -H *.jpg /S
3. Finally, delete all of the album art files from the current directory and all subdirectories:
   del /S *.jpg

Finding the Tracks Without Art

I love MediaMonkey.  Fire it up, then select the Album view from the tree on the left, then select”View” and then “Show Album Art with details”.  Anything without a picture on it needs embedded art.

Embedding Album Art

There are two options: let MediaMonkey do it for you, or find the image and paste it using MediaMonkey.

1. Let MediaMonkey do it for you:
   1. Select the album
   2. Press Ctrl+L (or right-click and select “Auto-tag from Web”)
   3. Click the “Auto-Tag” button
2. Do it manually:
   1. Find the album art from:
      1. Google Image Search
      2. Wikipedia.org
      3. Artist’s home page
      4. AlbumArt.org
   2. Select all track in the album
   3. Press Shift+Enter (or right-click and select “Properties”)
   4. Click the “Album Art” tab.
   5. Right-click and select “Paste”
   6. Select “Save image to tag (if possible)”
   7. Click “OK” twice to finish.