Windows Medial Player: Incorrect Album Art

[CyberWilhelm]

Hate to be That Guy again, but I ran into another problem recently using Windows Media Player (the old-style one): I'm seeing incorrect album art for some of my albums.

Here's what I've been able to figure out: the problem only affects albums with the same name as another album, even if they have different release years.

As an example, these three albums (in the form of Artist - [Year] Album Name) are all showing the same album art (the one for Eric Clapton)
10,000 Maniacs - [1993] MTV Unplugged
Alice in Chains - [1996] MTV Unplugged
Eric Clapton - [1992] MTV Unplugged

Notably, none of the albums have the Album Artist tag set, and instead remap the Artist field. If I explicitly set they have different Album Artist tag, they show the correct album art in the WMP Library view after a MinimServer rescan.

Also, this only seems to affect WMP. I also use Bubble UPnP on Android, and that shows the correct album art everywhere currently.

This is an issue where I can update my tags as I find problems, but I figured you would like to know - and if a fix is easy, then that would also be great!

Here's my current profile. I'm running update 253, though this behavior appeared before then.

Code:

aliasTags = OriginalDate:Date
contentDir = /volume1/Music/MP3
displayName = Ulthar Music
indexTags = All Artists, Artist, Date, Genre, Composer
itemTags = Performer
tagFormat = Artist.displayFormat={}
tagOptions = Album.sortTags={Album, Artist}, all.ignore.sort={The}
tagValue = Performer.default={Artist}
upnpCustom = multiTag={Performer}, roleTags={AlbumArtist, Performer}
.profileVersion = 2.2

[simoncn]

Thanks for letting me know about this issue with Windows Media Player.

What do you mean by "remap the Artist field"? I don't see anything like this in your profile settings.

How are you providing artwork for these albums? For example, is it embedded in the album files or is it in a separate file such as folder.jpg or albumname.jpg?

[CyberWilhelm]

Apologies for the delay - I forgot that I'm not subscribed to threads I start by default.

Artwork is embedded in each individual song file.

Also, you're right about not mapping directly to Album Artist. I think I had some stale information in my mind when I posted this since it took a few tries of us going back and forth to find the right combination for having multi-artist tracks collecting properly in Windows Media Player.

That said, I think it's mapping Artist to Performer (if not present), and then Performer to Album Artist (if not present)?

[simoncn]

Your settings are not mapping Performer to AlbumArtist. They are sending any AlbumArtist tags in your files to WMP with no change.

It sounds like WMP needs to have the AlbumArtist tag set in order to handle album artwork correctly for allbums with the same album name. If you want MinimServer to automatically set the AlbumArtist tag value to the Artist tag value for all albums without an AlbumArtist tag (not just for albums with the same name as other albums), you can change your tagValue setting to this:

tagValue = Performer.default={Artist}, AlbumArtist.default={Artist}