Zune Marketplace Higher Res Album Art

[Kaiser]

Is it possible to upgrade the artwork? Hmmm..must find out.

[MrJoe]

Aside from revamping the album art pictures, Microsoft has made the update the "find info for all albums" command under the library menu work correctly.  The command used to just run in the background in a very slow manner for me, but I just had it finish in half a minute.  The "change album info" command works a little differently now as well.  The album art looks the same to me, but I couldn't really blow it up to see.  Here's a good step forward towards the launch

[Trastan]

I used mediamonkey to tag, so I think most of the pics were a good fit for the Zune.  If you replace it with a larger picture, won't it resize to the max on the Zune?   

I think you're missing something here. What you may not know is that, prior to this update, the Zune Marketplace album art was actually something along the lines of 200x200 pixels, which was actually SMALLER than the 240x240 album art viewable area on the Zune. Therefore, once you put one of those ZMP files onto the Zune, it had to upscale the 200x200 artwork to fit the 240x240 viewable area for album art, which caused some pretty heavy artifacting. Now that all of the artwork is high-resolution, it's able to be resized down to 240x240 and fit the entire viewable area at full quality and without artifacts.

iTunes has had pretty high resolution artwork for a while now, and this finally closes that gap. In fact, since iTunes'-purchased music can have pretty widely varying sizes for its artwork, the consistent high-resolution album art found on each ZMP song effectively one-ups iTunes' offering.

Huge kudos to the Zune team, as I'm sure that must have been no small feat.

[lenny]

daft punks stuff looks amazing
btw

[coot66]

Does anyone have a handy Before and After comparison? I'd love actually see the improvement...

-The Improving Coot66

[AK Water]

How do you update to the new Album Art?  Is there like a way to "re-scan" for album art?

[margerine]

See, my problem was always that I'd take high res art, implement it myself, but on its way to the soon it always seemed to be compressed. If this is also fixed through this change, then I sure am happy.

[Will Da Zuner]

somebody should upload album art before and after the update...

[Bond007]

It has been confirmed that Zune Marketplace gets higher resolution album art and there is actual real proof now.

http://www.zune-online.com/news/zune/zune-marketplace-gets-800x800-album-art.html
 

[JefTek]

Here are some Before and After Updates:

http://jeftek.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!F2042DC08607EF2!12352.entry

My Before files were 150x150 which doesn't make sense though.  The after are certainly 800x800 on the ones I re-downloaded.

[JefTek]

Also, I wonder how this affects disk space usage on the Zune?   Will the "* of tracks" decline because the files are bigger?

I guess i'ts not by that much so who really cares..

[segadc]

What about choosing "Overight all media information" in the Library tab?  Would that work for getting the new album art automatically?

[JefTek]

I tried doing that as well.  Since there already is Album Art, there is nothing to replace.   The only way that seems to work is to delete your files in Windows Explorer, then go back and re-download.

You can use the Restore Library from Account Management to do it all in one shot.

[jagowar]

is there anyway yet to update your exising albums?  ie my mp3 collection i had pre zune?  the update album info doesnt seem to have new album art yet.

[Zunerama Ed.]

Here's a before-and-after shot of the album art: