vista media center overwrites folder.jpg images

oh the wonders of vista media center! :-), as you can see from my title this is to do with vista resizing your nice high def album art images to a crappy 200x200 size image, i just thank god that my high def album art is also embeded in my mp3 files so i can export them out safely, phew!, to anybody out there who used folder.jpg's exclusively my sympathy goes out to you!.

ok well this is a known bug/feature in vista media center, and indeed windows media player, which is what drives vmc in any case, at the mo there are several ways around this but none of them are tidy, my own untested way around this is as follows, i am going to try this tonight so i will let you know if it works.

1. do a search for *.jpg in your music folders and delete all existing files (assuming you have the original high def album artwork).
2. export your embeded artwork from your mp3 files using mp3tag with filename folder.jpg, if your unsure of how to do this then please see my later posts "import/exporting album art using mp3tag"
3. drop to a command prompt and navigate to your music folders and run "attrib -r -a -s -h" (handy to remember to clear all attrib always thing RASH) *.jpg /s
4. what this does is clears all existing attribs for your jpg's.
5. next run "attrib +r *.jpg /s" again from the command prompt on your music folders
6. what this does is makes all your jpg images read only to stop vista overwriting.

the thinking behind vmc resizing the artwork is to try and make the music part of vmc as fast as possible by reducing the size of the images displayed, but hey that doesnt help the perfectionist out there who loves high def album art now does it! :-)