Farewell, IE7

I upgraded my home and office PCs to IE7 in late October. It’s a fine browser; I intend to keep it on my office PC. At about the same time, my wife and I bought a Dream’eo Enza Portable Media Center for our anniversary. My desktop at home runs Windows Media Center Edition, which communicates with a Linksys Media Center Extender in our living room. Unfortunately, that particular combination of devices does not play well with IE7.

You see, Windows Media Player won’t sync album art to the portable device unless the images are embedded in the individual files (or possibly if you let Windows Media Player automatically update all the album info, but I don’t trust it enough to try that). So I dutifully went through my music collection and embedded album art in all the tracks (using MediaMonkey, which I recommend highly). The portable device now displays the album art beautifully.

But now Windows MCE displays a black square where the currently-playing album’s cover should appear! This is apparently a well-known issue: MCE + IE7 displays album art just fine, unless it’s embedded in the music file.

So my choices were:

• Keep IE7 and embed the album art, so that it appears on the portable device but not in MCE;
• Keep IE7 and delete the embedded art, so that it appears in MCE but not on the portable device; or,
• Uninstall IE7, so that album art works correctly everywhere.

Sorry, IE7, you’re not that good. Farewell from my home PC until you work correctly with MCE and embedded album art.

UPDATE: Windows Media Player’s refusal to sync non-embedded album art to the Dream’eo Enza may be a problem with the device. If so, I apologize for impugning WMP. Nevertheless, my options remain the same.

Also, this comment claims that one can get IE7 to play well with Windows Media Player simply by allowing WMP as an add-on on IE7’s Manage Add-ons menu. Anyone with IE7 and MCE 2005 care to try this and let us know?

  9 Dec 06 10:14 PM · Comments (2) · Tags: Tech, Windows