Unwanted Artwork

[muziccity]

I have been a long time user of MediaMonkey, for more than 15 years now and I have been very pleased with it. However, I have stumbled onto a problem that is driving me crazy and I cannot resolve it. In fact I sometimes want to just get an alternate application or just give up altogether. Let me try and explain.

I have thousands and thousands of music files in my extensive collection. I have personally gone through and meticulously tagged, added album art, and various other functions. As I mentioned I am very meticulous, specifically with album artwork, making sure it matches the song/album/year. I use MediaMonkey to perform the tasks and always add the art to the tag.

Recently I have been finding extremely large numbers of files (hundreds & hundreds) of my music tagged with dozens of random album art photos, (each one with the same 28 separate jpg images). Each time I have to manually delete all but the correct album art photo, only thing is there are now as I said hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands as I cannot determine for sure and I don't know where these photos are coming from from or why they are there, and more importantly why they keep returning.

I need some help degerming what is going on and how to resolve it. Also if there is an add on or utility that I can use to identify the affected tracks and clean them up?

I do not keep ANY jpg, png or other image files in my music folders.

[Peke]

Hi,
For starter you should try to disable these two options.

[Tom de Jong]

I have spent a few hours going through the MediaMonkey forum history looking for hints on the problem I have with V4. This seems to be the best post to add to, since it described the exact same problem fairly recently and I have a follow-up question.

For starters, I have always deselected any options that auto-search for artwork or lyrics (both on the internet or my drive), because I want full control over what goes into the file properties and would rather spend some time adding the right artwork to the file tag manually. Sadly, a recent update to the latest release of V4 automatically reset 'Scan file directories for Artwork' to its default setting, which, for reasons beyond my comprehension, is ON So yes, now all the files that were in the general folder I use for 'songs not associated with a full album' have 61 different JPG images showing in their album art I truly love MediaMonkey and it's been worth every penny, but I can't see why this feature was not programmed a bit more defensively, because it's clearly causing headaches for many users (judging by the amount of times the response is turn the setting OFF).

That being said, I obviously switched the 'auto scan' setting back off as soon as I saw all the garbage in the album art. I know I can use the 'Album Art Tagger' script to remove invalid image references. The thing is, for that work, I first have to make the references invalid by removing the image files from the folder. The catch with that is: these files seem to be hidden in a way that even makes them invisible in Explorer when 'show hidden files' is ON. In the past, when I first dealt with this issue, I found that the file is there after all, but Explorer will only show it when you enter the exact file name in the file path. That worked fine when I was only dealing with a folder.jpg that was inadverdently added to all songs in the folder, but in this case there are 61 images hiding there, all with AlbumArt_{<some UUID>}_Large as their name. I don't feel ike writing down 61 UUID's (since the file name is not copyable) and entering them manually in Explorer. Can anyone tell me if there is a different way to find these 'invisible' JPG files and delete them, so I can then use AlbumArtTagger to clean up the album art for all the 17.000+ files?

PS I never stored any image in said folder myself, but I read somewhere that Windows MediaPlayer will automatically do so when you use it to play a music file, which may be why they are hiding there. I switched off any form of auto look-up or auto scanning when I invested in MediaMonkey years ago. Sadly, the problem seems to be haunting me (and many other users).

[Tom de Jong]

Never mind, I just figured out how to select these elusive image files. It seems they are not only hidden, but marked as 'system files'. After switching off the setting in Explorer that hides such files (resulting in a warning from Windows that you really should never delete them or your system might stop working), I was able to select them by searching for *.jpg (as I had tried to no avail before). It turns out there were a total of 5000+ image files lurking in the file tree for my music. They have now all been removed. All that remains is for AlbumArtTagger to clean up all the missing art from the file properties overnight.

PS My comments regarding the default setting for the 'auto-scan' are still from the bottom of my heart.