Managing the Music Library

The Music library is where Windows 7 consolidates all your digital music files. These files may be stored in the My Music or Public Music folders, or in any subfolders within these folders. (For example, if you're an iPod/iPhone user, you'll find most of your music stored in the iTunes subfolder within the My Music folder.)

Individual music tracks are typically stored in folders for the corresponding album. Album folders are stored in folders for the performing artist. It goes like this: Music folder → Artist folder → Album folder → Track files.

Changing Album Artwork

Within each album folder are the individual tracks for that album, of course, but also several hidden system files that provide the artwork for those tracks. As you can see the master artwork file is labeled Folder.jpg and is the image displayed when you play any of these tracks in Windows Media Player or other media player program. WMP also creates a file dubbed AlbumArtSmall and a few other oddly named AlbumArt files, which are resized versions of the Folder.jpg file used in various parts of the WMP display.

If you want to use different album art for an album, you'll first need to delete the existing Folder.jpg and other artwork files. You can then copy the new artwork to that album's folder and rename the artwork file Folder.jpg.

Likewise, if an album didn't automatically have art downloaded, you can add the album art by copying the appropriate image file to the album folder. Make sure you rename the image file Folder.jpg, of course.

Tip One good place to search for album art is on Amazon.com.When you find the artwork for the album you want, right-click the image on the Amazon page, select Save Image As, and save the image to the album folder on your hard drive.

You can also embed artwork in individual music tracks. While this isn't necessary (and, in fact, increases the size of each file), it's something a lot of hard-core users like to do, just to make sure that the right artwork is displayed in every possible music player or device. You can't do this from within Windows, however; you have to use a third-party tag-editing program to do the job. The most popular of these tag editors include the following:

• www.jthink.net/jaikoz/
• www.mp3tag.de/en/
• www.tagtuner.com

These programs will also edit other music file attributes-such as those we'll discuss next.