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Topic: Best Format for Cover Art Booklets? (Read 12099 times) previous topic - next topic
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Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Hi guys.

I'm preparing to convert all my CDs to FLAC.  I'm a big fan of the information found in the booklets that accompany the CD.  I was wondering if there was any standard for scanning these?  I want my collection to be (& stay) compatible.  I know jpeg can be used but the compression usually screws up text.

PS Can multiple picture files be embedded inside a FLAC file?

Thanx 4 looking.

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #1 –
JPG works pretty well if the quality level isn't too lower (like 98+ is ideal). Other than that PNG is decent, it compresses pretty good and is lossless.

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #2 –
Well, if you want to scan these covers on your own, then it doesn't make much sense to save it in a lossless image format, because the scan simply will not be lossless.

Quote from: skywalka on
PS Can multiple picture files be embedded inside a FLAC file?


Yes, just take a look here at the --picture tag.
But bear in mind, when you rip your music to multiple flac files and embed all the covers in all the single flac files, this is pretty much redundant and blows up the file size (if you scan your album art in high res). That's why I don't embed any album art in my flac files. I do scan all the album art (fron-/back cover, etc.), but I only save it in the files system.

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: exec on
Well, if you want to scan these covers on your own, then it doesn't make much sense to save it in a lossless image format, because the scan simply will not be lossless.


Makes no sense ripping in FLAC either because it's not lossless. Clearly it was down-sampled from the master tape already. If you want to get maximum image quality lossless is the way to go, personally I don't see the reason thought. Digital cover Art never really does it for me.

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #4 –
Quote from: XQYZ on
Makes no sense ripping in FLAC either because it's not lossless. Clearly it was down-sampled from the master tape already. If you want to get maximum image quality lossless is the way to go, personally I don't see the reason thought. Digital cover Art never really does it for me.


FLAC is lossless regarding the source, e.g. CD (if it was ripped accurately). A scanned cover will never be lossless regarding the source. Even when you have a full color-calibrated environment (scanner and monitor at least), you'll never get a 100% accurate repoduction.
When I had to take a guess, I think that the loss from saving a scan as jpg (with good quality level!) is much lower than the loss from scanning the cover. In other words, you shouldn't be able to see a difference when compared to a lossless image file format.

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: skywalka on
Hi guys.

I'm preparing to convert all my CDs to FLAC.  I'm a big fan of the information found in the booklets that accompany the CD.  I was wondering if there was any standard for scanning these?  I want my collection to be (& stay) compatible.  I know jpeg can be used but the compression usually screws up text.

PS Can multiple picture files be embedded inside a FLAC file?

Thanx 4 looking.


Play around with JPEG quality, scan some of your most detailed stuff in and play

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: skywalka on
I'm a big fan of the information found in the booklets that accompany the CD.  I was wondering if there was any standard for scanning these?
AFAIK, there isn't.
You could just scan the artwork and leave it as is, and only process it when you want to print it. Or you could heavily process it, correct colors, skew and rotation and crop the borders.

IMHO it's not worth doing too much work here, except for the one cover image that you want to display in your music player.

Quote from: skywalka on
I want my collection to be (& stay) compatible.

Unless you use obscure picture formats like JPEG2000 or individualistic file names, there should be no problems. Embedded images may not be supported, but usually all players with cover support will show you folder.jpg or cover.jpg.

Quote from: skywalka on
I know jpeg can be used but the compression usually screws up text.

That's not true. It depends on the quality and on the resolution or rather DPI you use.

Quote from: skywalka on
PS Can multiple picture files be embedded inside a FLAC file?

Yes, but if you choose to use lossless image formats like PNG the embedded image can make up almost as much space as the audio data, for example if you use DPI above 600.

I would also suggest you use JPEG with a very high quality setting of at least >90 and not too low of a DPI setting of at least 300 or yet better 600.

Also if you don't plan to embed everything into one single FLAC file, I would not recommend embedding all images in all audio files, but only the ones you want your music player to display. Since all of them support reading actual image files anyway, I wouldn't even embed any images into the audio files at all. Why make things more complicated than they have to be?

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #7 –
Thanx 4 the advice guys.

I'll go with jpeg at high quality.  I'll just embed the covers for media players to display.

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #8 –
Normally I use JPEG for single cover art images and use the PDF creation function of my scanner for booklets.
It's only audiophile if it's inconvenient.

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #10 –
You are discussing the best format to save scans in, but all of you seem not to be aware of the biggest killer in this process: The raster-dots it was printed in and the quality of the scanner.

When you scan these dots and scale the image, you mostly end up with moire and/or a distorted image, depending on how much you scale it down.

You should get a scanner with optics good enough to scan the raster-dots/patterns, even though the source and your target resolution is much lower. I prefer 600dpi as a good compromise between speed and quality.

Then you need to get rid of the raster-pattern, by converting it into smooth colors instead. Descreen does this with incredible quality (much better than all the blur/sharpen-guides which people seem to generally recommend on the web).

I bought a Canon LiDE 210 myself with the intention of scanning covers. Even this seems to be a bad choice, if you want high quality scans, because for every inch there seems to be a glitch with a dot missing. Scaled down to a reasonable size, this is hard to see, but the descreen-plugin seems to be confused with the broken pattern and creates some kind of artifact (it's easier to show with a picture).

Really you might go check out the albumartexchange-site for high quality covers. There's a large community, dedicated to scanning covers and even retouching them to make them look really good.
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #11 –
This could be an option for CD Booklets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Book_Archive_file
Just zip / rar the individual files/pages (jpg or png) into one archive change the file name extension and view it with a cbr viewer later...

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Bugs.Bunny on
This could be an option for CD Booklets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Book_Archive_file
Just zip / rar the individual files/pages (jpg or png) into one archive change the file name extension and view it with a cbr viewer later...
Zip almost never and RAR or 7-Zip very rarely and very little improve the compression of JPEG's or PNG's, on top of that browsing CBR files crates temporary files of the original images, not ideal, what's wrong with PDF?


Kohlrabi's take on the matter is the right one IMO.
WavPack 5.7.0 -b384hx6cmv / qaac64 2.80 -V 100

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #13 –
Quote from: DARcode on
Zip almost never and RAR or 7-Zip very rarely and very little improve the compression of JPEG's or PNG's, on top of that browsing CBR files crates temporary files of the original images, not ideal, what's wrong with PDF?

This is using Zip as an archive not a compressor.
The advantage is simple, all modern OSs have the tools built-in to open and extract files from zips.  The same can not be said of pdfs.

So you've added the possibility of additional functionality to your "booklet" w/o breaking any existing functionality.
Creature of habit.

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #14 –
Quote from: Soap on
The advantage is simple, all modern OSs have the tools built-in to open and extract files from zips.  The same can not be said of pdfs.


Which modern OS can handle zips but not pdfs?

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #15 –
Quote from: XQYZ on
Quote from: Soap on
The advantage is simple, all modern OSs have the tools built-in to open and extract files from zips.  The same can not be said of pdfs.


Which modern OS can handle zips but not pdfs?

My copy of Windows 7 (pro 64 bit) sure can't create PDFs without additional software.
It sure can't extract images from a PDF.

Can yours?

zip is a safe least-common-denominator.  Will work great as a storage format on anything recent and as a viewing format on any computer you control.  The same can NOT be said of PDF.
Creature of habit.

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #16 –
Quote from: Soap on
My copy of Windows 7 (pro 64 bit) sure can't create PDFs without additional software.
It sure can't extract images from a PDF.

Can yours?

zip is a safe least-common-denominator.  Will work great as a storage format on anything recent and as a viewing format on any computer you control.  The same can NOT be said of PDF.


PDF works on any modern system (out of the box is irrelevant as nobody uses a system like that). There are various open source and free viewers and creators available and it's well documented.
zip and jpgs are fine, but I don't get the reason behind the zip - unless you don't like to have too many files (ie you're using stuff like FAT16/ext2 with insanely low file limits).

And yes, I can extract images from pdf just fine under Linux.

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #17 –
Out-of-the-box does matter for those of us who do not control all the computers we use.

And, believe it or not, that is a consideration for some of us.
Creature of habit.

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #18 –
Four years on & I'm wondering if the jury is still out.

I have an iPhone & had a look at my iBooks app for the first time & was surprised to find some album art booklets from music I'd bought.  I was surprised to see that they weren't square but weren't as wide as an open CD book. 

Anybody know what happens if you buy music on Android?
 

Best Format for Cover Art Booklets?

Reply #19 –
For images, 24-bit PNG is a lot like FLAC: It's compressed file-size-wise, but it's lossless. PNG is lossless, size-compressed TIFF. So IMHO there's no point in scanning as TIFF because PNG will get you the identical image quality.

The person who noted the original raster printing above is right - you want to use a descreening filter in your scanner's scanning software (if it has that feature) - usually the "magazine" setting (133ppi) works pretty well. You can do it afterwards in an image editor, but in my experience descreening is one of the few filters that works better during scanning than it does after the fact.

As for PDF, maybe it's a Mac vs PC thing, but PDF creation and manipulation is well-integrated into the Mac OS - just scan a bunch of PNGs, open them in Preview, arrange them how you'd like, and print them to PDF as one file.