[gibxxi]

Removing "Multimedia Support / Features" (and hence WMP and the WMPNetworkService) from Windows via "Add/Remove Programs - Turn Windows Features On or Off" will also stop "Cast To..." functionality from working, which strangely doesn't seem to mess with album artwork, as far as i've experienced thus far (Still waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one).

Not sure if that other piece of garbage they coded (Groove Music Player) also exhibits the same "functionality" as WMP. Once bitten, twice shy. I don't use it. Get a decent music player:

Winamp: https://getwacup.com/ (Don't use the latest one from Winamp.com, as it's buggy as hell and the WASAPI plugin doesn't work properly).



Gib.

Windows is causing me a problem in that the album art it pulls in is not always correct, see example in pic below where all the album arts should be the same as the third one.

Given I can't see these album art files in windows how do I delete them?

They only show incorrectly on my windows laptop, on android following changes I made they are now showing correctly.

 

You'll need to open an explorer window (Windows Explorer) at the item location, and temporarily open up the advanced view settings dialog:

Ribbon Menu - > View -> Options (Far Right-hand-side)

In the dialog box that opens, select the "View" tab. Select the radio button for the option marked "Show Hidden files, folders and drives", you'll probably also need to uncheck the checkbox labelled "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)" as Windows considers these clutter artwork files as "system files". It does the same for any Folder.jpg's with a leading upper case "F", but bizarrely ignores any files named folder.jpg (lower case "f"). For the second item, it will display a warning dialog box. As this is just a temporary change, just accept it and move on.

You can then click OK / Apply (or both) and the changes will be applied to all Windows Explorer instances. It is possible to hide / unhide files via the option in the ribbon menu too, but this won't affect system files, hence my reasoning behind showing you how to do both from the same dialog window. Once your done, you can (and probably should) reverse the above back to defaults.

You should then be able to see all the hidden clutter art in the album folder, and any other affected folder, as these changes are applied globally. Don't rule out the fact that the artwork may also be embedded into the actual music files too, so you might need to use a 3rd-party tool to remove/change that. I use "Tag&Rename" software for that, as it's superior in this regard to "MP3tag" IMHO. Or you could set up MusicBrainz Picard which also has a Fanart.tv plugin available where it can be configured to replace existing artwork embedded into music files, but Picard isn't for the faint of heart.

Hope this helps.

Gib.