Windows 7 Playing Music in Media Center: AAC File Poor Quality Album Art vs. MP3 File High Quality Album Art

[AkashaJSummer]

When playing AAC music files in Windows 7 Media Center the album art is poor quality and does not display at it's native resolution. To test this I created an album with 2 identical songs. One song is encoded with AAC and has 1000dpi album art, the other song is encoded with MP3 and has the same 1000dpi album art. See this video example where when the album is played, the first MP3 song displays full resolution album art, then when I skip to the next AAC song the album art becomes poor quality. I then keep skipping to each song to further demonstrate the differences of the 2 songs album art quality.



Is this issue due to AAC album art not being compatible with MCE? If so what would cause this and can it be fixed? I have just discovered this issue after ripping 130 CDs using iTunes 10.7 AAC encoder. To get the album art to show in MCE I initially had to re-add all the album art in iTunes to embed it into all the AAC song files.

 

[AkashaJSummer]

Here’s how you do it.

1. Create a DWORD with the name “LargeAlbumArtSize” and give it a value of 320 at the following REGISTRY EDITOR address:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences

After doing this, all newly imported music will display 800x800 ablum artwork when playing music instead of the low resolution 200x200.

To update the album art for your current music collection that was imported before editing the registry do the following:

2. Remove all music from your MCE library.

3. Close MCE

4. Delete the “Art Cache” folder from C:\Users\USER NAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\ehome

5. In Windows Explorer open FOLDER OPTIONS, and in the VIEW tab select “Show hidden files, folders, or drives”, and uncheck “Hide protected operating system files”.

6. In Windows Explorer go to your music folder and do a search for “Folder.jpg”.

7. Delete all the files named “Folder”. This deletes all the 200x200 low resolution album art.

8. Import all your music back into MCE. WMP will create all new 800x800 album art that will now display when playing music in MCE. 800x800 is the highest resolution that WMP will create.

Enjoy the high resolution album art!