max size of flac embedded picture?

2007-12-31 17:48:04

hi,

i'm curious what the maximum filesize of embedded pictures in flac files is

for example, there are albums which i have 1-2mb large front and back, may these be safely added to the flac files?

i haven't really used this feature in the past (just tried it), but like the idea to store covers in metadata instead of keeping them separately

anyway, i'm also interested in such feature for mp3s and oggs

thanks for your comments in advance

max size of flac embedded picture?

Reply #1 – 2007-12-31 18:41:23

Each individual picture is limited to about 16 megabytes (because of the 24-bit metadata block length), but there's no limit on the amount of pictures or their total overall size.

max size of flac embedded picture?

Reply #2 – 2007-12-31 18:45:30

thank you

does the same apply to oggs (since they both use vorbis comment)?

and do you know what's about mp3s?

max size of flac embedded picture?

Reply #3 – 2007-12-31 19:01:55

The size limit on MP3s depends on what version of ID3 tag you use.  ID3v2.2 also has a limit of around 16 megabytes per picture.  ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 aren't really limited on a per-picture basis, but the total size of all pictures can't go above a 268 megabyte limit for any tag version.

Ogg Vorbis is a little trickier.  Vorbis comments are only for text (FLAC stores picture data in different blocks from the vorbis comments, for instance) so I think pictures are meant to be stored in a separate substream, but I've never seen that done in practice so I'm not sure about any picture size limits such a substream might have.

max size of flac embedded picture?

Reply #4 – 2007-12-31 19:07:08

i use id3v2.4, so it won't be a problem, i don't think i'm gonna put 268mb+ size covers into 100 mb mp3s )

as for ogg, well, i think i don't really have ogg albums but i was just curious coz i saw the option to store pictures in them, in easytag and in aqualung too

thanks for clueing me up

max size of flac embedded picture?

Reply #5 – 2008-01-01 13:14:11

hmm now i'm tagging and it seems it mustn't be over ~1000px (i guess on both sides) otherwise the tagger gives me error
for example, in easytag: "application transferred too few scanlines"

have you ever faced the same problem?

max size of flac embedded picture?

Reply #6 – 2008-01-01 14:26:36

"application transferred too few scanlines" sounds like a PyGTK problem which I've run into in the past.  The problem I had is that the gtk.gdk.PixbufLoader class's write() method used to take any amount of data, so one could send a whole image file of any size to it at once and have it work.  However, a recent PyGTK update sets some limit, so now one has to use several write() passes to get the image data into the class.

I'm sure the authors of the software you're using could fix this problem pretty easily once they know about it.

max size of flac embedded picture?

Reply #7 – 2008-01-01 14:42:53

wow, that was quite professional and in-depth

i informed both project (aqualung & easytag), hope it will be fixed soon, thanks for the info

ps: i also gave them a link to your post, i hope it's not a problem