Windows Media Player 10 and Ripping CDs
The history of Windows Media Player feels like the history of Microsoft in miniature. I used to hate this application—especially after an early version overwrote all of my hand-typed ID3 tags in hundreds of MP3s—and was happily devoted to Winamp. Simple, intimate features like putting Add to Now Playing List in the context menu finally made it through committees and lawyers—and whatever else it takes to backwardly compatible innovate forward.
I woefully underestimated the simplicity of “ripping” a CD with Windows Media Player 10. When I heard some polo shirt marketing guy on MSDN talking about how he ripped his entire CD collection to disk, I had no idea that all he had to was to open his CD-ROM drive and put in the disk while Windows Media Player 10 is running. It was up there in “Ripping CDs in Windows Media Player” the whole time.
I just had one question for few hours, ‘Where the hell is the album cover art being stored for these ripped files?’ I examined the ripped files with MP3 Tag Tools and could not find any embedded images. When I took another look at the files in the context of the folders they were stored in, using a tool called Album Cover Art Downloader, I saw that Windows Media Player sets an image in the folder for ripped files! So the Windows Media Player team probably decided its more “performant” to set the image in a root folder that can serve as an “album sleeve” for the files.