Lost Album Art Thumbnails in mp3 Files

I have received a lot of good info here by lurking and using the search function, had a question of my own today, for which I can't seem to find an answer.

I keep my music organized in separate artist and album folders. For each CD which I convert to mp3, I perform all tagging using a separate program, and I always embed album art so that the files will look good on my mp3 player.

Here's the problem: I recently upgraded from a 320 gb drive to a 500 (notebook), and transferred all of those files over using Ghost's "clone" fxn. Prior to the upgrade, all of my mp3 files would show up in Vista's explorer as the album art with a little winamp icon at the bottom left.. This was perfect, because it made the files look nice, and it was really easy to see if I had already tagged a particular album. Unfortunately, since the move, I seem to have lost some/all of those embedded icons (making them look like a generic music icon), and attempting to retag makes them go away completely. I know it is not a problem with the way I am tagging them, because if I access those same exact files across the network from another vista machine, the album art displays perfectly.

I have tried rebuilding the icons, re-tagging, my folder options are set to NOT show icons only, and ARE set to show folder contents as thumbnails, and this works perfectly for non-music files. Essentially nothing in my folder settings has changed from before. I think some registry setting got tweaked in the upgrade, but darned if I can figure it out.

I'd be most grateful for any advice...

Erik

That's an interesting problem indeed!

Did you do an exact clone of the drive (including the Vista installation), or just the music files?

I cloned the whole thing, OS and all. I am not exactly sure that's what caused the problem, but it did start right around that time.

After much tweaking, I solved this problem. Somehow, the part of the registry which tells Vista to show the embedded art as icon became corrupted. I imported the following info into my registry (copied/pasted from another computer), and my icon were magically back (after a restart). (Note that winamp is installed in my system as the default mp3 player):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3]
@="Winamp.File"
"OldViewer"=""
"Winamp_Back"="WMP11.AssocFile.MP3"
"MP2.Last"="Custom"
"MPlayer2.BAK"="Winamp.File"
"PerceivedType"="audio"
"Content Type"="audio/mpeg"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3\OpenWithList]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3\OpenWithList\iTunes.exe]
@=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3\OpenWithList\MP3BookHelper. exe]
@=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3\OpenWithList\ShowTime.exe]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3\OpenWithProgIds]
"MP3File"=hex(0):
"WMP11.AssocFile.MP3"=hex(0):
"IrfanView.mp3"=""
"QuickTime.mp3"=hex(0):
@=""
"iTunes.mp3"=hex:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3\PersistentHandler]
@="{098f2470-bae0-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3\ShellEx]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3\ShellEx\{b0450a3b-6bcb-468e-a6c1-eba9c8c0c586}]
@="{d1d82552-50db-4c62-9c46-235230826f88}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{9DBD2C50-62AD-11D0-B806-00C04FD706EC}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp3\ShellEx\{e357fccd-a995-4576-b01f-234630154e96}]
@="{9DBD2C50-62AD-11D0-B806-00C04FD706EC}"

Hi,

I'm trying to fix exactly the same problem using what you copy/pasted above, however when I try to import it to the registry I get this error message...

"the specified file is not a registry script. You can only import binary registry files from within the registry editor"

I've never done any of this before so it's probably mind numbing obvious to you, but any ideas?

Thanks!

_____

Edit - thought a bit more info might be useful.

I copied what you posted up there, pasted in to notepad & saved it as new.reg

Is that wrong? Is there a different way of making a registry file cause my computer doesn't seem to think it is one even though the icon's the same as my backup! I'm so confused...

jBlade's solution actually works pretty well for me. Bit of a pain though!

That's an interesting problem indeed!

Excellent post, I look forward to reading more.

If you've lost the music collection on your computer, but store the collection on your ... Can You Load Music From an iPod to iTunes?thumbnail ... An iPod stores the album art for the MP3 files in a separate folder from the MP3 files themselves.
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