Removing Album Art from WMP - part 2

Windows 7 Pro & WMP ver 12.
I've ripped over a thousand cd's (to mp3 format) and literally spent hours deleting all album art/graphics from the music folders that I carefully organized and backed up. Oh, and I modified my rip options and disabled display and retreiving media info from internet. But that didn't help.

My problem is that when I play these mp3's using WMP, new jpg (album art) files suddenly appear in the music folder being played. Typically I'll get 2 small jpg files that pop up in the folder being played....but I've had as many as a dozen or more jpg's appear in a folder. What's worse (and more confusing) is that I've discovered "new" album art show up in other music folders that were not being played! I'm not happy about the artwork files that show up in a folder I'm playing...but in a folder I wasn't playing? How does that even happen?

I searched the Windows SevenForums and discovered the "wipe out jpg" solution provided by user Callender in March 2014. Following his instructions using the Command Window worked - PARTIALLY. I discovered and deleted hundreds of jpg files that I had previously deleted. But as soon as I played some music through WMP, other "new" jpg's popped up in the folder that I was playing.

I'm getting desperate. Should I use a different media player instead of WMP? Is there a more permanant fix to stop WMP from allowing these files to appear?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I'm not sure on this one. I don't actually use WMP - it's disabled on my machine.

However if you look at registry settings here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences

Try setting the Metadata Retrieval Value to zero. A reboot may be required for the setting to take effect.

MrTAD said:

I don't want to be impolite, but what media player do you use instead of WMP?

Personally I use PotPlayer with the MadVR plugin for video playback and currently use MusicBee for audio playback although I do also have a few other players installed.