The process is actually quite simple but we’ll cover some of the basics for those not as familiar with finding and working with hidden system files and folders. The first thing you’ll need to do is enable the viewing of hidden files and folders through the control panel. Open up the control panel from the start menu and select Appearance and Personalization.

On the next screen choose the option under Folder Options marked Show Hidden Files and Folders.

This will bring up an options dialog with a large number of settings to customize your folder appearance inside Windows Explorer. By default Windows hides a number of folders that are commonly used by installed programs to store important data to protect them from less experienced users. We’ll need to see these folder to navigate the folder structure to clear our album art cache however.

To enable showing hidden files and folders mark the selection to Show hidden files, folder and drives and press OK. That’s all there is to it. Note that you don’t need to uncheck the option to Hide protected operating system files, nor is it recommended.

Once we can see hidden folders open up Windows Explorer from the programs menu and navigate to the C:\Users folder and open the folder with the same name as your username. Inside you’ll now see a slightly transparent folder named AppData.

Open this folder then navigate into the \local\Microsoft\ehome folder inside. You should now be in C:\Users\USERNAME\local\Microsoft\ehome and there should be a folder named Art Cache. Right click this folder and select the delete option.

Now the next time you launch Windows 7 Media Center and enter the Music section the program will reload all the album cover art from the files. This process could take quite some time depending on the size of your collection. That’s all there is to it! You should now have a completely refreshed album art cache inside Media Center.

The new album art waterfall displayed behind the currently playing music selection is a subtly animated display of random album art from your music collection slowly falling toward the bottom of the screen. Of course, if this subtle animation gives you a bit of vertigo or that Spice Girls cover that could result in years of ridicule from the boys needs hidden we better locate those settings.

From the Media Center start menu locate Settings –> Music –> Now Playing. At the bottom of this screen you’ll see options to adjust the Now Playing Background. At this point there’s no options to choose which covers are displayed and which are not but you can enable the animation, use a still background or disable the background all together.

Windows 7 Media Center also packs a brand new Photo screen saver. Enable or disable it from Settings –> Pictures –> Slide Show Screensaver.

Now after the set period of time your favorite pictures will be displayed as a fresh screensaver. To adjust what pictures are shown in the screensaver you’ll need to adjust your favorite pictures settings in Settings –> Pictures –> Favorite Pictures. Here you can adjust the slideshow to use a specific set of pictures including those with a certain rating, by folder or slideshow or simply all pictures.

That’s all there is to adjusting these new features in Windows 7 Media Center. Hopefully you enjoy these new additions even more now that we’ve discovered just how to tweak them to your preferences.

Now that’s fantastic but they left out any option to increase or decrease the speed through a simple settings interface. Instead the rate was locked down in the trusty old ehres.dll file. This is bad because it makes it somewhat more difficult to change but it’s good because when opening up this file we find there are a great many possibilities to create custom animated backgrounds with this same file.

For those not interested in the how-to of this, simply download this prefab patch to double the rate at which the album art waterfall scrolls. For the rest of you interested in how this is done and maybe curious about creating your own animated backgrounds you’ll need a resource editor such as Restorator and an XML or plain text editor, preferably XML Notepad which is free from Microsoft download.

Once you’ve got your tools, create a copy of the ehres.dll file from C:\Windows\ehome\. Next, open up Restorator (or your resource editor of choice) and load that copy of the ehres.dll file. At this point you should probably create a backup of this file as well, just in case something should go awry later on.

Now, with ehres.dll open in the resource editor locate the html folder and find the file named albumartbackground.xml. This is the file that contains all the information for use in the album art waterfall background. Extract this file by simply dragging and dropping the file from the resource pane onto your desktop.

Next, open this albumartbackground.xml file in XML Notepad. You should see something similar to the image above. Under the tree view, open up the first UI folder, then the Locals folder and finally the second Timer folder.

The name of this Timer should read TimerForScrolling and by default is set to 2000 (milliseconds). To increase the speed of the scrolling effect you will need to decrease the Interval at which this timer “ticks”. For instance, to double the speed of the scrolling effect set the Interval to 1000. Be aware, however, that at a certain lower interval the animation will not be able to maintain it’s rate and will likely not render properly.

Once you have set your new timer interval, save the XML file and reload it into the resource editor. You should be able to simply drag the file back onto it’s original location in the resource tree. Afterwards, save the new ehres.dll file you’ve created and copy it back into it’s original location in C:\Windows\ehome\ (you will need ownership of the original ehres.dll file).

Now, you may be wondering how you can create your own custom animations using this file. That is something that is indeed possible but somewhat beyond the range of this particular guide. Using the tools above and a little bit of trial and error, however, you should be able to work out some fairly nice effects through this XML.

You can find even more details on editing animation effects for Windows 7 Media Center on MSDN’s guide to editing MCML (Media Center Markup Language). If you do create some nice effects that you’d like to share with the community send them in! Email your custom XML files as attachments to mhealy@hack7mc.com or use this special form.

This certainly isn’t desirable if, for instance, you’d like to browse by genre then get a list of artists in that genre. Choosing to sort by a certain genre in the default music library simply gives you a list of all the albums marked with that genre.

Enter Music Browser with the ability to not only browse through your music library by folder but load up artwork for each artist, genre or any other folder method you’ve setup. Adding artwork to your folders is as simple as adding a folder.jpg file to that folder.

To get started with Music Browser download the latest version which supports installation on Windows 7. By default the program will install to the Extra Programs area of Media Center. If you’d like to add an icon to our custom Media Browser strip you can download the reg file to do that right here as well.

It’s not all butter and cream though. Inside the settings panel you’ll notice that you can’t add network shares to the plug-in by default. There’s a way around this though. Open up Windows Explorer and browse to “C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\MusicBrowser”. Inside you should find a couple of folders and a MusicBrowser.config file. Open it up in Notepad and change the following line to look like so:

<InitialFolder>C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\MusicBrowser\VirtualFolder.vf</InitialFolder>

Next create a new text file in the same folder called “VirtualFolder.vf” and for each network share add “folder: //SHAREDLOCATION” on it’s own line. For example, “folder: \\MEDIACENTER-PC\Storage\My Music”.

Aside from that small caveat using Music Browser was fairly straightforward. Music Browser also sports three different view-types, list, folder and poster. Each one displaying artwork and folder names differently. All views incorporate the artwork however which is a definite plus over the native music library.

If you don’t already have them adding folder images to each genre and artist can pose quite a time-sink but will surely be rewarding in the end for those who venture onward. For those looking for genre folder icons there is quite a sizable collection at The Genres Pool Flickr group.

Also, though the program doesn’t appear to currently be under development it is open source for anyone willing to pick-up the torch. Perhaps we can get a plug-in as customizable as the widely used Media Browser.

Sharing playlists across your network is actually fairly simple and only requires that you create a central playlist folder that can be accessed from all PCs on the network. Follow this guide on Setting Up Shared Network Folder in Libraries and create a central folder on your Media Center (or another PC).

Once you’ve got your central playlist folder, which can even be your default networked music folder, make sure that each PC has access to the folder. Once each computer on the network has access to the folder over the network you’ll need to add that folder to the Music library either inside Media Center or Windows Media Player. Right-click the Music folder inside Media Player and select Manage Music Library or bring up the information menu inside your Media Center Music Library and select Manage Libraries.

Now just press the Add.. button and add the folder to your library on each computer you’d like to create or access playlists from. Now here’s the trick to save you from having to do much manual work to transfer those playlists around the network.

Make sure to set your Default Save Location to the same folder you’ve just added across the entire network. This will ensure that each PC has access to newly saved playlists and Windows will save Playlists using network locations for music files instead of local locations. Just right click the new folder and select Default Save Location.

Now whenever someone save a playlist it will be saved to this network location by default making it available to each of the PCs with the folder in the Music Library.

It’s not rocket science, I know, but around the house accessing playlists across the entire house is a fairly important part of a connected home and the Media Center experience. Making things simple for the less technically inclined family members can save you some headaches down the road so don’t overlook the simple things!

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How do we get that data off the disk and onto our drives though? Simple, a program called Exact Audio Copy. This apply named program will take the pure audio from your disk and encode it to FLAC without much hassle at all. It even includes the ability to retrieve disk information from freeDB and some fairly advanced error correction (for those less than new CDs).

Getting started is easy, just download and install Exact Audio Copy then run the program. An initial startup wizard will appear asking you to set some of the basic options. During this you should let EAC know that you’ll be encoding to FLAC not MP3. Also, entering your e-mail address is required to retrieve information about CDs from freeDB.

Once the initial setup has been completed insert a disk into the drive you setup as the default during configuration. After a few moments EAC should display a listing of al the tracks on the disk in the main window. You’ll notice that none of these tracks have any tag information and EAC will most likely want to process offset information on a first run. Go ahead and let that happen and any gap processing EAC would like to run.

Now to retrieve information for this CD automatically you can press the CD icon in the toolbar to access freeDB. As long as freeDB recognizes the disk you’ve loaded it should automatically retrieve artist, title and track information. Otherwise, you can edit basic information in the main EAC interface before ripping.

To begin ripping the CD to separate FLAC files you just need to press the MP3 button on the left. This slight confusion in the interface can cause some trouble for new users but the button will use your default compression mode, MP3 or not. There are also options available to rip the disk to a single or multiple uncompressed WAV file(s) with or without a cue file. Unfortunately, at this time WMP and Media Center do not support cue files.

During encoding you can monitor the process through a small dialog displaying the progress of the current track, the entire disk and any problems that arise in the Status box. You will also be able to monitor any error correction taking place through the small red grid box on this window. Any error processing will appear as a progress type display in the box.

Once the encode has completed that’s all there is to getting the audio from the disk to your hard drive. You’ll need to follow the guide on Playing FLAC Files in WMP and Media Center before you will have access to them in those programs. Then just sit back and enjoy your high quality lossless encoded audio!

Get more control over audio in Media Center with this guide on Using FFDShow Audio in Media Center!

This is where we will turn to a free little program called Mp3Tag. Mp3Tag will allow us to really get into the details of our mp3 files and will even automatically retrieve details and album art from the web. Being able to pull all the album information from a source like Amazon.com is a sure time saver. Once the program has been downloaded and installed getting tag information couldn’t be much simpler.

Start out by going to the File menu and selecting “Add Directory” to bring up a dialog to choose your music folder. Mp3Tag will then go about loading your music collection and displaying any details about your music it can find. Once it’s finished that select the songs or album you want to change the album art (or other details) for on the right.

Notice the missing album art in the screenshot above, this is what we’re looking to fix. To do this open the “Tag Sources” menu at the top and select a location for Mp3Tag to retrieve the new album cover and details from. Choosing Amazon.com will generally return good results. You will need to tell the program what search term to use while finding the album then select the correct one from the next dialog that comes up.

If the correct album isn’t listed in the results go back and try a different search term or a different source from the menu. Once you have found the correct album another dialog will appear showing the details retrieved. Here you are able to edit the information before it’s applied to the files. By default track numbers will not be altered but check to make sure the songs listed on the left are the same ones listed on the right. The order of the songs listed won’t make a difference.

Once the information is all correct and the album cover is shown in the right hand box press OK to save the information to the files. If you would like to store a folder.jpg of the album cover locally there is an option to do so under the “Utils” button on the bottom left. Once you’ve returned to the main window you should see the results of the edit displayed on the left.

Once all your files have been tagged, restart Media Player and the new album information should be displayed. If it doesn’t appear immediately you can try restarting the system or removing and re-adding the folders to the music library. Sometimes the library will still persist despite everything and you may need to follow the directions in Fixing a Corrupt Windows Media Player Database to solve the problem.

Once you’re Music Library is setup try using Media Center to automatically Play Your Favorite Music!

Setting up your Windows 7 Media Center is easy, making it your own can be easy too. Here are 10 simple steps you can take to make your Media Center experience more complete, more personal, more enjoyable.

1. Add ClearQAM to Your TV Listings
2. Add Custom Apps to Your Extras Library
3. Do It Better – Add Apps with Custom Icons and Details
4. Add MKVs to Your Movie Library
5. Use A Better Movie Library – Media Browser
6. Expand Your Sound from Stereo to Surround
7. Play Your Music in FLAC
8. Check Your Local Weather
9. Listen To Online Radio through Shoutcast
10. Add Boxee Streaming TV to Your Media Center

These 10 simple hacks will create a better Media Center for you and your family to enjoy. Don’t forget to check back to Hack7MC to get the latest hacks for your Windows 7 Media Center.

Keep in touch: Bookmark Hack7MC on Del.icio.us, subscribe to the RSS Feed or even Follow along on Twitter.

The first step to getting your favorites set are to choose how Media Center will determine which tracks to add to your favorites list.  Options include tracks rated 4 or 5 stars, tracks you’ve played the most and tracks that have recently been added to your library.  Alternatively it is possible to make a simple playlist that contains all of your favorite tracks for Media Center to play from.

Since your Music Library includes all the song data from Media Center and Media Player any changes made in one will be reflected in the other.  This allows for easy editing of song information such as rating from Windows Media Player. Doing bulk editing of the library can be much easier from the Media Player interface, especially on the initial setup. However, it is possible in Windows 7 Media Center to edit some song information from inside the Media Center interface.

Bringing up the editing window is simple. In the album view scroll down the song list to the song you want to edit details for and select it. Other views will bring up the song edit view by default once a song is selected. From this song view rating can be changed quickly, a nice feature when using ratings to determine favorites. Just select the star item and press until the appropriate rating is listed.  These same options can also be brought up with the information or right-click button menu.

Choosing the “Edit Info” selection will allow for the editing of artist name, song title as well as rating. This can be cumbersome with a remote and is another situation where using Media Player would probably be better suited.  Using the media sharing native to Media Player you can even edit details from another machine on the same network. Having a second machine on your network to edit playlists, ratings and to use the new Play To feature is certainly something that can enhance the user experience in Windows 7.

Once your done setting up your favorites and editing your music ratings, starting up a playlist of the best music in the library is as easy as pushing a single button.  Just hit the “Play Favorites” button under the Music section and your off. Media Center will pull together a playlist and get it started, perfect for a quick party mix or when there just isn’t time to make a playlist.

If you’ve got FLAC files in your music collection be sure to check out this article on getting them into your library too!

When you’re done setting up FFDShow Audio check out this guide on setting up FFDShow Video as well.

Many enthusiasts prefer the ability to set their favorite codec for use in Media Center rather than the defaults. Unfortunately, this is more difficult than simply installing the chosen codec as you normally would. Windows 7 Media Center will default to the native codecs regardless of codec settings.

The fix for this situation is to install the desired codec, in this case FFDShow, then rename a system file to disable the native codec. First, download a copy of FFDShow Tryouts from the Sourceforge site right here. Follow the basic installation steps but make sure to enable FFDShow to be used for all available codecs when the option is presented. Windows 7 x64 users should download and install both the latest beta and the 64-bit SVN.

Enabling FFDShow for all audio codec types will lower the chance of instability in Windows 7 default applications such as Media Player. If you are confident in your codec setup you can most likely skip this and use your desired codecs.

Next you will need to have the “Take Ownership” registry hack we’ve used before in changing our Media Center theme. You can download the registry file to enable this menu here. Once you have the .reg file downloaded double-click to install the registry fix and permit it to change the registry when prompted.

To enable FFDShow to play your mp3 files in the music section, open Windows Explorer and navigate to “C:\Windows\system32\” and locate the file name “MP3DMOD.DLL”. Right-click to bring up the menu and choose “Take Ownership” then rename the file “MP3DMOD.DLL.bak”. Windows 7 x64 users will need to repeat this step for the C:\Windows\SysWOW64\” folder as well. This will disable the native filter and can be reversed by changing the file name back at any time.

To enable FFDShow for live television and other formats using the MPEG2 codec inside of Media Center there is also a registry entry that needs to be changed. First we need to find the CLSID for FFDShow. To do that download Radlight’s Filter Manager right here. Extract the files to any location and run the exe file inside. Inside this program expand DirectShow Filters and scroll down to FFDShow Audio Decoder. Right click the entry and select “Copy CLSID to Clipboard”.

Next, open regedit in Administrator mode: using the start menu type regedit then press ctrl-shift-enter. Then navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\MediaCenter\Decoder”. Inside there should be two strings, right-click “PreferredMPEG2AudioDecoderCLSID” and choose “Modify..”. Then enter the CLSID that you’ve copied from FilterManager in the box and press ok.

Media Center will need to be restarted before the changes will take effect but that should set your music, live television and most anything in Media Center to use FFDShow Audio instead of the native codecs included in Windows 7. The stability of this hack has not been tested outside of systems using purely Media Center as the user interface and may carry unintended consequences, perform at your own risk.

Check out this article for more detailed information on using the FFDShow codecs to tweak your sound and video settings in Media Center, including enabling surround sound for your stereo music files. Stay in touch using the Hack7MC RSS feed or follow along on Twitter!

Don’t forget to check out this guide on setting up FFDShow Video in Media Center once you’re done here!