How to: Stop Windows Home Server 2011 Overwriting Your Album Art and MP3 Tags

By on August 5, 2011 in News, Windows Home Server

The Windows Home Server community has once again been up in arms regarding a feature built into Windows Home Server 2011 which automatically synchronises (read: overwrites) the MP3 tags and album art of music files stored in WHS’ shared Music folder.

As seen in this thread at WGS Forums as well as this thread over at the Home Server Show forums, users have been scratching their heads wondering why their tags and album art are being updated each night, and most importantly, how to stop Microsoft from doing so. As explained by WGS reader stelvio:

I had WHS v1 and it worked fine for streaming my Music share to my HTPC w WMC7. WMP12 was notorious for downloading Album Art and messing up people’s Music Libraries (example:see here).

Now WHS 2011 seems to act like WMP12 and goes online to fetch album art and retag .mp3 files. I have all options in WMP12 to stop all access to the internet. I even edit a group policy setting (example: see here) to ensure this setting sticks. These settings work fine for Windows 7 systems. BUT, it does not stick for WHS 2011 and it will still overwrite my High Resolution folder.jpg (600×600) with the lower resolution 200×200 hidden system files AlbumArtSmall {GUID}.jpg and my Hi-Res .jpg gets deleted! These hidden system files are only seen when the proper folders settings are enabled/disabled. I even set all my folder.jpg’s to read-only, but WHS 2011 ignores this and destroys my Music library at will.

Overwriting content in this way is a pretty serious issue, particularly for those users that have spent endless hours cultivating collections of hi-res album art and updating MP3 tags. Most annoyingly, there’s little warning of the “feature” within the Windows Home Server 2011 Dashboard or out of box experience and no setting to switch off the feature in that same Dashboard.

Read those forum threads and the accompanying bug in Microsoft Connect, and you’ll see that the community has been working hard either find a workaround to kill the feature, or get Microsoft to acknowledge the issue and provide a resolution. Finally, the Home and Small Business Server Team updated the bug with the following steps to stop the process:

Hi,
Thank you for your feedbacks [sic].
We have confirmed that the followig [sic] manual workarounds will address this issue.
1.    On server, open Task Scheduler by clicking Start->Administrative Tools -> Task Scheduler
2.    Navigate to location \Microsoft\Windows\Windows Server
3.    Right click “Media Streaming Metadata Synchronizer” and click Disable.

Unfortunately due to multiple reasons we will not be able to make code fix in this release. But it’s a great future design suggestion.

Thank You.

Windows Home and Small Business Server Team

I’m thankful that Microsoft have acknowledged the issue and have provided a method to halt the service, albeit with the most limited of communication channels. I’m grateful too to the guys on the WGS and Home Server Show forums who have discussed the issue, scratched heads and have worked to get this communication from Microsoft. But not fixing this issue in the code with the necessary Dashboard controls (alongside an upfront warning of how WHS 2011 treats your metadata) is a poor decision indeed – yes, I know, development time and budgets are always tight – but overwriting people’s data/metadata without their knowledge is a AAA priority issue and should be nailed. Now.

I’ll leave it to some of the commenters on Microsoft Connect to outline the reasons why:

This is unacceptable. Not sure if one guy in MS has been the same three eyed mentally challenged ignoramous that thinks this feature being turned on by default in all versions of WMP since v6.4, is the best idea since sliced bread…it’s NOT! I don’t like your music scraper touching my tags, and I’m tired of it. I pay for your server software, and you slip one in on us in the background to start grabbing tags from WMP and the internet that only YOU seem to think are incorrect.

–

I can see where some users might appreciate this, but a great many others such as myself, having meticulously organized our collections already, certainly do not.

–

I just discovered this issue a few minutes ago. I setup WHS 2011 last week, no add-ins, nothing but plain vanilla install. All of my MP3 collection was on a 2TB USB drive, which serves as my redundant backup. I used a Robocopy CMD file to copy the files to the WHS 2011 default Music share. After adding a few files to the server, I decided to run Robocopy again, this time synchronizing the server folders to the USB drive. Imagine my shock when every MP3 was flagged as “Newer” and began copying over my meticulously organized collection.

Checking the ID3 tags, they have indeed been overwritten by WHS 2011. I use MediaMonkey for organizing tags, and I strip out fields such as “label” and “composer” which mean nothing to me. Alas, those have now been overwritten. So has my album art. A great number of albums and songs have INCORRECT data now, mostly multi-disc collections and multi-artist compliations.

Whoever thought it was acceptable to mess with my tags? It is marketed as a SERVER. Files I store there should remain UNTOUCHED.

Needless to say, I am distraught and pissed.

Have you been affected by this issue? Let us know in the comments below and your views on Microsoft’s decision not to fix the code.


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About Terry Walsh

Terry Walsh is the founding editor and owner of We Got Served. Since February 2007, the site has provided detailed coverage and analysis of the emerging home server category, and has subsequently grown into a trusted outlet for digital home news and reviews.
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  • S-F

    I think this is the final nail in the coffin. I don’t believe I will ever be using WHS 2011. The only reason I would switch is for support for >2 TB drives. If I have to build a RAID array any way I’ll just use the hack. V2 is a bomb. It’s the bastard child of M$.

  • Helmer

    Hmm…just checked and indeed….all the folder.jpg's and albumart_{234t453}.jpg were OVERWRITTEN :( OMG this can't be possible! Why didn't Microsoft had this FIXED……fucking hell….my entire collection has to be fixed :(

    I already thought a few weeks ago that I failed to copy ID-Tag-fixed-albums to my WHS, but Microsoft just totally trashed my collection…

  • SadPanda

    Just took a look at my files, and they are all untouched… Thank god for that!. Can this be because i use stablebit ?

  • stelvio

    FLAC audio files remain untouched (90% of my music collection) because M$ does not support it.
    Thank you for that.
    mp3's get trashed.

  • Almulder

    Man I just got WHS 2011 two days ago and have not yet moved my files over to it from v1. Glad I read this. It would suck having to redo 167gb of mp3s. Thanks for the heads up

    But to all other that had their tags messed up. Where are your backups? I have my music collection on two separate external drives as backup. So if this would have happened I still would have just reloaded them from the backup.

    I put too much work into my music collection to ever want to worry about lossing any of it. So I go 2 cheap 500gb external drives to hold backups. I never put music on to my server without first putting it on both backups first. My backups never connect to the server once the server is seeded the first time. I do the same thing with my pictures and documents. It all fits nicely onto the one drive. One goes in my fire safe the other at a friends house encrypted in his fire safe.

    BACK UP YOU HARD WORK PEOPLE. I don’t care what company out there promises perfict backups. There is always a chance with software. So with high important files I manually manage them. It’s worth the extra trouble.

  • http://gcoupe.wordpress.com gcoupe

    Terry, you write:

    'Most annoyingly, there’s little warning of the “feature” within the Windows Home Server 2011 Dashboard or out of box experience…'

    Erm, there's NO warning whatsoever…

    • http://www.wegotserved.com Terry Walsh

      That's just a colloquial English way of saying there's no warning, Geoff….

  • phaze

    Terry, can you please comment on this part of the Home and Small Business Server teams response?:

    (…) Unfortunately due to multiple reasons we will not be able to make code fix in this release. But it’s a great future design suggestion. (…)

    What "release" are they referring to? A planned ServicePack, or WHS 2011itself?

    I mean, are they saying that they have no plans to fix this ever for WHS 2011? If so, it sounds like NO SP's are planned, and that WHS 2011 is actually dead in the water.

    Please understand that I hope I am misinterpreting this, and that they were referring to an imminent SP.

    • http://www.wegotserved.com Terry Walsh

      Hi phaze,

      The phrase can be interpreted a number of ways, and unfortunately I'm unable to give you a definitive answer as to which interpretation is correct. I'm trying to check out what the plan is with this issue via a few sources – if I can share any news, I will.

      Terry

  • Mitchell Hennessy

    I wonder why my collection of MP3s have been untouched?

  • stelvio

    In folder properties – Show hidden files
    Open your music share folder.
    Do a search for 1) desktop.ini and 2) AlbumArt.jpg
    If you see these, M$ has been messing with your data.

  • Tom

    Hi – is it only music in the default music folder that is affected, or is music in any folder likely to get hit ?
    what about videos's metadata ?

    -Tom

  • guest

    Wow. Just when I had bought a copy of WHS 2011 to upgrade from my WHS v1. I think I'm going to return my unopened copy of WHS 2011. I'm glad I read this post first. How can I trust it not to mess with my files that I copy onto the server?

  • Jeff

    Thanks for posting this. I disabled the task, too bad I disabled it a month after moving my music to 2011, but I only had a few artists with custom meta data. So not too much damage done.

  • Ilan

    Unbelievable. I don't know how else to put it. A server (albeit residential server) changing metadata without notice. Who thinks of these things at Microsoft. Who thinks of these things? Data is far too important be played with. I thought this is why they gave WHS v1 data redundancy.

    Whoever has taken over the team for WHS has really lost touch with the original idea of what Windows Home Server was meant to be. This isn't what I expected Windows Home Server v2 to be like. I don't think anyone did.

    Microsoft. Thank you for creating Windows Home Server v1 because it has changed my life. I hope that if it makes it to version 3 that you make some serious changes and get better input from the public. All WHS v2 has done has made me doubt Microsoft products which is very hard to do because of the release of Windows 7.

  • Gary

    I think a little perspective might be in order. By default WMP WILL NOT overwrite existing metadata–it will only fill in missing information. Other than album art, are people here finding that WHS is overwriting existing custom ID3 tags? (I have seen no evidence of this.)

    For album art the situation is different. The artwork that is stored at the folder level as hidden, system files is considered *proprietary* data for use by the operating system. If you overwrite these files by hand, you should have NO expectation that your changes will stick.

    There is a correct way of making custom album art 'sticky' in Windows Media Player: 1) in Windows Explorer, locate and select an image file and copy it to the clipboard (note: you copy the file itself–it is not necessary to open the image and copy the bitmap); 2) in WMP, locate the target album, right click on the album cover, and choose 'Paste album art". The image is written directly into the tracks and this will override any folder-level artwork that WMP downloads automatically. (You are not limited to 200 pixel images this way either.)

    • XrayDoc88

      For years I have battled the unwelcome process of WMP downloading and replacing my own album art.  I have thousands of scanned or photographed CD and album covers.  My current system to avoid the unwelcome carnage has been the following.  First, turn off automatic internet updates in WMP.  Second, name my custom image “folder.jpg” and place it in the album folder.  Third, make the folder.jpg file hidden and read only.  It may be that only the first step actually did anything.

      I am very intrigued by your method however.  I had no idea that album art images could be added to individual song files.  Could you answer some questions for me?

      1.  When you do this does each file size increase exactly by the size of the album art?
      2.  Does the tagged art take precidence over whatever might be named “folder.jpg”?
      3.  What happens when looking at album folders outside of WMP?  If you’re in thumbnail view, will you see the tagged image or the folder.jpg image?  What if two songs in the same folder had different tagged images?  How could that possibly work?
      4.  When you paste the album art in WMP as you describe, do you have to paste it individually into each track, or can you do an album worth of songs at once?

      Thanks.

  • Gary

    (continuing…) For what it's worth, I've always used WMP to manage my album art and metadata, with the goal that everything look correct in Media Center. My entire collection–850 albums currently–has migrated to WHS 2011 and it appears the same as it did before.

    I'm not discounting what others are reporting, but with respect to album art I sense there is a disconnect between what the community thinks is their metadata, and what Microsoft views as private data for use by the operating system. WMP exposes a proper way to tag albums with custom artwork, and this does not make use of the folder-level jpegs.

    If someone has evidence of WMP directly overwriting ID3 tags (not just filling in missing ones), I think that is quite a serious issue.

    • http://gcoupe.wordpress.com gcoupe

      Gary, have you not read what some people have reported? – the metadata service in WHS 2011 HAS overwritten their metadata tags. For example, 'tommeyers' reported on Microsoft Connect:

      "Checking the ID3 tags, they have indeed been overwritten by WHS 2011. I use MediaMonkey for organizing tags, and I strip out fields such as "label" and "composer" which mean nothing to me. Alas, those have now been overwritten. So has my album art. A great number of albums and songs have INCORRECT data now, mostly multi-disc collections and multi-artist compliations".

      • Mitchell Hennessy

        And that's where it gets kinda dicey, because as I said before, all my music remain untouched, maybe it's because when I installed WHS 2011 I changed WMP12 options to not update or overwrite any data, even though it's not actually managing my library.

        Or perhaps it's because I actually added cover art (typically 800×800 px images) to the files themselves in iTunes before migrating the media to the server, rather than a single JPEG in the folder.

        …and my metadata service was (and still is) running.

        So, while I agree that this situation is hardly acceptable, especially in the instance where data is not only added to stripped fields, but changed and overwritten completely, there may be some unknown catalyst that's causing this issue, because as I said, all my music remains untouched.

        • http://gcoupe.wordpress.com gcoupe

          Mitchell,

          While your music remains untouched, the fact remains that for some, it is definitely that WHS 2011 service that's causing the issue. I agree that the ID3 tag corruption is rare – it only seems to hit compilation albums. I have over 1,000 CDs, and just one of my albums got hit – and it happened to be a compilation album.

          The album art corruption of folder.jpgs is another issue – that happens frequently. For that reason I have all my album art stored as hi-res images in the tags of the individual tracks. I learned that lesson a long time ago with WMP.

          • Mitchell Hennessy

            I guess I never had the folder.jpg thing, as I've always added the media directly to the track, either within the WMP library or in iTunes.

            And yes, I learned my lesson a while ago with WMP11.

            I never meant the takeaway from my reply to imply that the service wasn't causing the issue, but that it was that service with a combination of other factors that LETS it happen, that hasn't in my case. It was more "well, it hasn't happened in my case, here's what I did, here's how my music is organized, what do you think is stopping the service from affecting MY music?".

      • Gary

        "I strip out fields such as "label" and "composer" which mean nothing to me. Alas, those have now been overwritten…"

        gcoupe: as I read this, the OP is saying that the WHS metadata sync process is *adding* metadata to *empty* tags–(this is consistent with how WMC works by default, as I stated above).

        Now, it may be an issue for him that WHS is *adding* metadata to the empty tags in his files unecessarily, but this is not a destructive change, as would be overwriting the contents of an existing tag that he has entered custom data into. THIS is what I have seen no evidence of.

        Let me be clear: I STRONGLY agree with all of you that the user should be given MORE control over this. WHS should expose the metadata sync preferences for the WMC streaming service to give control over this. But again, I think the facts should be fully understood before we all jump to conclusions.

        • tomeyers

          Wrong, Gary.  The person you’re quoting is me.  I’m the one Terry quoted above, and I’m also the one who discovered and documented the “fix” of disabling the service, which Microsoft has now made official via a Technet article:

          —————————
          Music Album Art & Tags get overwritten

          Background
          To ensure imported music file can be refreshed automatically with online album art, a scheduled task will sync media metadata regularly for files on WSH music shares. However, this task will also overwrite some customized properties of the tags.
          —————————

          I can tell you without equivocation that the task not only added “missing” metadata (which I had purposefully removed) but also modified data.  This is what Microsoft describes in stating the task will ”overwrite some customized properties of the tags.”

          And just to clarify a couple of other points:

          - Someone commented that embedding album art in the MP3 files themselves would somehow prevent these issues.  That is precisely how my collection is managed, and it did not matter.  The task still fetched and replaced album art.

          - I no longer have the modified files to document precisely what changed, but every file was tagged and RoboCopy saw them all as “newer” than my source when I ran a synchronization.  Some people here have said only a handful of files were touched, but in my case it was all or nearly all of them.  Maybe because I deliberately leave fields like “label” and “composer” blank, or perhaps for some other reason.  Regardless, that was my experience.

          - Some smug comments were made here about keeping multiple backups. I never said I didn’t have another backup, and in fact I did indeed have multiple backups of my collection, so those commenters can rest easy now.  But thanks for the concern–I could feel the love.  :)

  • stelvio

    Microsoft decided to change the Connect thread from Resolved (made 2011-08-05) back to Active (made 2011-08-08).
    Not sure what this means, maybe someone there found this thread – I posted a link to it.

    @Gary, read the entire thread. The point & proof is M$ is changing tags and overwriting album art – even if it's set to read-only. How can this be acceptable?

  • Arie

    The whole sharing music from WHS 2011 is driving me nuts. First it was overwriting the ID3 tags of my MP3 files such as Artist, Album, et cetera, but that has been solved with disabling this service some time ago already… but what still bothers me enormously is that everything shows up fine now in WMP on WHS 2011 itself via RDP, but when I open WMP on a Windows 7 client for example, the shared library from WHS 2011 lacks artwork for some albums, or some albums have outdated artwork, which I updated earlier. Rebuilding the whole music library on WHS 2011 does not solve this. One time half of the artwork will be there, the next time it will be three quarters and the next time it may be half of the artwork again… but no matter how many albums get their artwork shown, they will always show outdated artwork for those albums which have been updated at one moment. It is driving me nuts!

  • Dan Gravell

    This sounds dead frustrating. As I say, the only thing worse than no automation when you're dealing with a large music library is automation gone wrong: http://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-b…

    I really think there is a place for automation, but not like this. It has to be at the behest of the music collector.

  • Stephen Naylor

    This advice from Microsoft quoted above misses that disabling the scheduled task doesn't turn off the active instance that is already running!

    Either Reboot or end the task by starting task scheduler and select "Display all running tasks" on the right of the screen then select the synchroniser task and select "end task"

  • trekker99

    Just got bitten by this bug… Just as well I keep a backup on my desktop so synchronizing them back to the server.

  • Dan Gravell

    What's the best way of changing all the system and hidden attributes for these files, in bulk? Is a batch script using attrib the only way? I'd like to update my blog post about installing bliss on WHS – http://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-b… with a way to do it semi-automatically. :)