I was wondering if you were working on a way to automate the album art. I've heard of other programs that search your library (or selected folders) and will then search Amazon.com for the album art, and add it to each file. I was wondering if you were developing something like that, because it would be useful, espically if it was accurate.
 

Also, it would be nice to do the opposite of what your program does (scan the directory for MP3 files, copy the album art, resize if necessary, and paste the file as a FOLDER.JPG file for Windows to use.)
 

Your question about automating retrieval of album art from Amazon is interesting. I will look into the legalities and copyright issues. If it is legal, I will consider adding it in a future revision.

The other question extracting images from the MP3 file is interesting as well. That is on my todo list already. I don't think I would re-size them but I might include the option. Increasing the size of an image is always a bad idea, even though Windows XP Media Center does it by design (YUCK!).

And I see no reason to resize down. I wouldn't want mine scaled down. And Windows Media Player 11 is going to scale them down to 200x200 pixels whether you or I want it to or not.
 

On a completly different subject, I was wondering if you were going to add "advanced" folder handling. Here's what I mean by "Advanced". Most programs will default the library to an Artist folder, with Album subfolders, all within a single "base" folder. My library is too large for this organization. I have added one more level (between the "base" folder and the "artist" folder.) I have the "base" folder, then a folder for each letter of the alphabet (A, B, C, etc.), then I have the Artists that begin with the letter in the correct folder. This makes it easier to search for music using the folder views.

Obviously, this "advanced" feature would only be needed for large libraries, but it would be nice if your program had that option.

P.S. Is this blog the correct way to contact you about these issues, or is there another way? Also, I was wondering if you were looking for a beta tester? I can offer mainly my experience with MP3s since the Napster era, user interfaces from different programs, and ideas.
 

Annon, I believe you have the mistaken idea that I have something to do with Windows Media Player. I do not. I am simply a music and, prior to WMP 11, Windows Media Player fan. I have written the utilities I publish here for my own use over the last few years to address shortcomings in Windows Media Player and have discovered in the Windows Media Player newsgroups that others have the same frustrations that I have and would benefit from my utilities. So I published them for all to use.

As for your advanced folder idea, I do not know of any way to make a suggestion or submit a bug to the Windows Media Player product team. They have chosen not to use any of the community feedback mechanisms that other Microsoft products use. There's really no way to communicate WMP issues to Microsoft except to call Microsoft Product Support for a fee of anywhere from 35 dollars (soon to be 59 dollars) up to several hundred dollars depending on your eligibility and support needs. If you purchased your copy of Windows through an OEM included on your PC, you are not eligible for any support from Microsoft and you cannot report a bug or suggestion to Microsoft for any amount of money.

Also, I think it would make more sense to use blog comments to comment about the blog article. A better way to communicate with me would be to find me where I hang out almost daily: the Windows Media Player newsgroups at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/community/newsgroups/windowsmedia/default.mspx.
 

Actually, I never thought you officially had anything to do with WMP. Granted, I found your website when you responded to a problem I posted on Microsoft's WMP forum, but I was under the impression that you an independent person. From those posts, I gathered that you are developing some sort of program to mess with ID3 tags, which is why these little utilities are comming out. Each utility was part of a larger program, which you were developing. I was just trying to provide input for you.

In the future, I'll keep my posts "on-topic".

Thank you for your help, and I look forward to more little utilities.
 

Hi Dale,
I'm very impressed with you're utilities so far. U have skill

I have a request/suggestion.

The ID3 Embed Pictures utility is good for people wanting to embed folders.jpg, but for people like me there is nothing that will work.

I have recently upgraded to media center edition and i have the newest and greatest media player etc. anyway, the problem with it is that MCE doesn't like embedded images and preffers just the folder.jpg images in the folder. I have both.

I'd like to be able to (in a batch manner like you're program) remove all embedded images in all mp3 files in a certain folder, leaving folder.jpg in place.

anyway keep up the good work and i look forward to your collection...
 

I seem to be having some issues with your program. It doesn't always embed the Folder.jpg in the file. It seems like it is only on some folders and mp3s. I have completely cleared the id3 tags on those mp3 and they still don't get the image. I have changed the name of the folder to test thinking it was the folder name and still no images. The progress bar just zooms by and nothing in tag. It seems to work on other folders. I have tested it on Vista Enterprise, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP with the same effects. I have also tried the mp3 on the local hard drive and on a shared network drive. Any ideas?
 

Hey Dale,

This is a very useful application! I am a user of Sony Ericsson and the Walkman feature on it is only able to show embedded album art. Many users stumble upon the problem of mass processing their music collection.

I found that your application has issues with certain files and gives me the 'FrameValue does not represent a valid COMMframe' error message (whatever it might mean). I don't know if it is possible to export the faulty folders to some 'quarantaine' folder and let the program go on with processing. I don't know how to handle those files yet (maybe you do) but I might replace them by other copies. Furthermore it would be handy to have the app actually installed instead of running the .exe so that it can record the latest settings.

This is just my input but I really think that your program has great potential! Thanks you for sharing.

Ize
 

Ize,

COMM frames are used for storing comments in ID3 tags. iTunes is a big user of comment frames and creates comment frames that do not follow the specification. Other ID3 tag editors may very well do the same thing.

I built my ID3 libvrary to handle the bugs in iTunes COMM frames - at least those that I have run across - but I cannot say about all of the others ID3 editors that may have problems.

If you will email me one of the defective tracks to dalepres and then the at symbol and then msn and then dot com, I would like to see what is breaking the COMM frames and if I can build in a work around.

You may also want to try looking at my ID3 Raw Tag Viewer. You can use it to delete specific frames or tags from your MP3 files - assuming it can handle the broken frames. If not, you'd have to delete the entire tag.

With frames that do not comply with the ID3 standards from http://www.id3.org, I cannot always interpret what the program that created those frames was trying to do, and I cannot interpret what the user wants to do.

Dale
 

Well, what you said is proven to be true because what I did is load all the files in ID3-TagIt and copy the vital track information to the filename, then delete the tags and extract the info for new tags. Then I could easily embed the art into the new tags. Downside is that at this moment I don't have any faulty tracks left! I will save the next error encounter and send it to you. By the way, I have succesfully embedded art into nearly 10k MP3's! Looks really cool on my Walkman phone with 4GB storage. :)
 

Dale,

Hello. Great program! This is exactly what I was wanting, and I was about ready to write one myself -- in C# no less -- when I found yours.

However, I encountered the same problem as Ize. All of my MP3s would give the COMMframe error he describes.

I decided to investigate. First, using your raw tag viewer, I found that my MP3s all have a single v2.3 COMM frame which is, essentially, empty (no description, no text). After language is a single null and nothing more. According to the ID3 v2.3 specs for the COMM frame, this is valid. The text between the language and the null would be the description; the text after the null but before the end (as computed using the header size field) would be the text.

Being the impatient, overzealous type, I used Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector tool to extract (disassemble) your assembly to C# code and set to work figuring out how to solve the problem for my own situation. The problem occurs in ID3Lib. It appears that Frame.ParseNullTerminatedStringList(...) is returning "new string[0]" for these empty frames because it sees that "bytes.Length" (1, the null) is equal to the "terminationBytes.Length" (1) plus "bOM.Length" (0). COMMFrame.ParseFrameValue(...) then sees this 0-length array and throws the error because it is expecting 2 strings to come back (desc, text).

In my own particular case, I saw no reason why I couldn't simply remove these empty comment frames from my files... So, I modified COMMFrame.ParseFrameValue(...) to record via a bool member whether the frame is "empty" (textArray.Length == 0). I modified COMMFrame.Write(...) to return 0 if this member is true, which of course results in these frames being skipped during the write-back stage. I then ran the modifications against some test folders and it worked for me.

Thanks for all your work on this! All the 'semi-professional' tagging software I've tried seems to think that I actually want to sit there manually browsing 13,000+ times to add art to my 13,000+ tracks. Automatically using Folder.jpg seems like common sense to you and me.
 

Hi Dale,

I seem to experience the same problems as the "anonymous user" above.

I'm using .NET framework 3.0, and the embedding works only on a few directories. For a large majority of them, the progressbar completes quickly and indicates success x/x tags written, but the files are not modified.

At first I thought about a directory name issue, but it seems to have no link to my problem..

Is there something i'm missing ?
 

I forgot to tell you that your piece of software is very nice and to thank you for your work ! Simple, easy to use and efficient, software as I like it.
 

It appears that the program doesn't like it when the specified image does not exist (i.e. "Album Art.jpg"). I'd like to just set "My Music" as the root folder and scan my entire collection, skipping any directories that don't have "Album Art.jpg", but this isn't currently possible. The error I'm getting on any folder containing mp3s but no image is "Valud of 'null' is not valid for 'stream'".
 

Great little program - like some other commenters here, I was worried I would have to make something like it myself.

Anyhow, question: does the "Delete existing images?" option delete the original image files or the prior id3-embedded images or both? What I want to do is only delete existing id3 images.

Thanks,
Bjorn
 

I would also love to see a way to batch run your program on all of my album folders at once. I thought the "Include subfolders" option would do that, but it caused the following error message:
http://i10.tinypic.com/6pgvzg6.jpg

Bjorn
 

Bjorn,

You didn't provide the details section of that error report so I can't say for sure but your problem may be related to a newly discovered issue with the program. With multi-core processors, there is a threading issue. I have identified the bug in my program that never showed up in any of my PCs, even multi-core, except in Windows Vista. I am working on a workaround.

As for your question about deleting files, that option in in the program only deletes the embedded files in your ID3 tags; it does not delete any image files from your PC.
 

I just tried this out on a group of six albums. Five albums worked, but one gave me the error: "Frame already exists: Cover (front), Description:". In addition to this, two songs from two different albums disappeared from my Windows Media Player library. The files are still there and I can play them by double-clicking on the file, but they will no longer show up in the WMP library.
 

The two tracks that no longer show up in your library probably have corrupted ID3 tags. I am not sure why they would have gotten corrupted. It is probably related to the error you got about the frame already existing. Make sure you delete existing pictures when adding new. I wouldn't have expected this to cause you a problem but unexpected bugs do happen in software :). Use my Raw ID3 Tag Viewer or ID3 Tag Backup to remove the now corrupted ID3 tags, rebuild the tags in WMP and try again. Let me know how it works.

I am very interested in identifying and resolving the issue that caused your problem. Email me at dalepres at msn dot com and let's work on it together.

Thanks,

Dale
 

This application is great. I have one question. Using the id3lib.dll how does one just tag a jpg file into the APIC frame using Jscript.NET ?

var id3 = new ActiveXObject("Id3com.ID3comTag");
var AlbumArt : FileInfo = new FileInfo(path+"folder.jpg");
id3.link(fileMP3);
id3.title = id3title;
id3.Artist = id3artist;
id3.Album = id3album;
id3.year = id3year;
????id3.APIC = AlbumArt; ???
id3.Savev1Tag;
id3.Savev2Tag;
id3.clear;
 

Dale, Thank you so much for this utility. It's exactly what I've been looking for for around a month. I was just starting to write something of my own to get all of my music tagged with album art for iTunes and just happened to stumble upon your tool.

Thanks,
Hans
 

I'm trying to use the program, but I'm getting an error.

When I click execute it says FrameValue does not represent a valid COMMFrame.

???
 

Hey Dale, great tool - perfect..!!
 

The application has problems with some formats for COMM frames - particularly Apple's format. I don't think Apple's COMM frames follow the description in the ID3 spec but other ID3 experts disagree with me. In the end, it's Apple. I have to find the issue and fix it to work with iTunes (and any other program with the same format for COMM frames).

For those having the issue, I apologize that I have not fixed it yet; this is freeware and there's no one to pay the bills for me to spend the time on it right now.
 

Being Greek I have many CDs with Greek songs. I use Greek Language Keyboard (MS) and use the various accents/intonation marks. I used your id3 embedder for my album art. However, once I embed the album art, I end up having the greek information being replaced by jibberish. Is there a reason why this is happening? Can it be avoided?
 

Prodromos,

I am sorry you're having trouble. Because this has been a one man development effort, and I don't speak a second language or have a computer configured for a second language, I am unable to test the code I put in for globalization.

If you would send me a couple of your working MP3 files (those you haven't broken by using my tools) I will see if I can test it. I can set up a virtual machine for the Greek language - I think. It will be an interesting test. Email me at dalepres at m s n dot c o m with the sample files and the exact language setup you use on your PC. I can't promise how quickly I can look into it or if I can fix the problem but I will do what I can.
 

Dale -

Thank you SO much! I was fighting with WMP because it was showing some 200x200 art work even though I had embedded art work at 500x500. I deleted the files through WMP and reapplied the artwork using your embed tool. Then I added them back to WMP. Voila! Now the 500x500 shows.

Question - where can I download the player you created? It would be perfect for me.

Thanks again.