So, recently I've discovered MusicBrainz Picard and decided to reorganize my music collection (all in .mp3).
Now, I want to add cover art wherever is possible.
My dilemma is: embed cover art with mp3, or make a folder.jpg in album directory, or maybe even both?
What are pros and cons of each approach?
Does any of software have problems with 1st or 2nd approach?
I'm using Winamp (maybe I'll switch to foobar) and have Ipod Nano.
I'm also considering on building HTPC so how does Windows display folder images (can it read from folder.jpg picture, or even from cover art embedded in mp3)?
Usually when cover art is embedded, each mp3 track on the album gets the cover art embedded in it. Each mp3 file has the same exact duplicate of the image, which is a little redundant. If you have a 12 track album with a 1mb album cover, you will be wasting about 11mb of space for each album. If you put one cover art picture in the album's folder, then you don't have to waste space. Also, if you ever need to update the album art, you only have to update 1 file instead of every mp3.
I know foobar supports getting the album art from a file in the album folder.
Yes and if each album cover is 100mb--whoa---what a problem!
I think it is a little disingenuous to suggest that this need be standard usage. Although you may very well use such album art...when op is asking about album art and portable media players in the same sentence I do not think maximum quality of art is a concern.
OP, you need to research the devices you are going to use. What do they support? That is, in my opinion, the primary issue. Many find art- embedded or not - sized as small as 50kb to work out just fine in actual practice.
terry
different programs use different display methods.
foobar2000 will display image files in the folder (usually named folder.jpg or cover.jpg) but will also display an image embedded in the file. if both, the image embedded in the file overrides and gets displayed.
Windows Media Player behaves similarly.
I don't know about Winamp at this point.
I think that iTunes either embeds artwork or saves it in one of its big database files (because after all, you wouldn't need it elsewhere, because you'd never, ever, possibly want to switch away from iTunes, right?)
But if you reinstall iTunes it can convert existing album art in the folder.jpg format. Not sure about how to go about it otherwise, but I'm no iTunes expert.
I use both embedded and folder album art.
What:
500×500 px relatively low-quality JPEG images of just the front cover.
Why:
I use foobar2000 to listen to music on my PC and an iPod to listen to it on-the-go.
foobar2000 works very nicely with the Album Art Panel plugin (foo_uie_albumart) to show folder album art, but it doesn’t support embedded album art.
iTunes/iPod work very nicely with embedded album art but don’t support folder album art.
With the size of my collection, the embedded album art does end up taking a not-insignificant chunk of storage space (~30kB/file), but the folder album art, being typically only ~30kB / 10-20 files is not quite as bad so it’s really a no-brainer. If you’re going to use embedded album art you might as well use both.
foobar2000 works very nicely with the Album Art Panel plugin (foo_uie_albumart) to show folder album art, but it doesn’t support embedded album art.
foobar2000 will indeed display embedded album art. it doesn't edit embedded jpg files (I use mp3tag to do this) but it displays embedded album art just fine, and if there's a file that has embedded art that's in a folder with its own folder.jpg, the embedded art will override the folder.jpg in foobar2000's display.
This is true at least back to 0.9.5.5, maybe earlier.
I am not very sure of this, but I don't think an iPod will display album art unless it is embedded in the music file itself. I don't know if iTunes recognizes separate 'folder.jpg' files and somehow magically makes them appear in the iPod. What I do know is that it cannot process 'cover.jpg' files, whereas Foobar2000 does that.
If you have a 12 track album with a 1mb album cover, you will be wasting about 11mb of space for each album.
Yes, and let's say that someone chooses fairly high quality 500x500 JPGs as album art of 50KB each. Let's say the average album has 15 tracks. That is a whopping 750KB added to a 60MB+ album!
I am not very sure of this, but I don't think an iPod will display album art unless it is embedded in the music file itself. I don't know if iTunes recognizes separate 'folder.jpg' files and somehow magically makes them appear in the iPod. What I do know is that it cannot process 'cover.jpg' files, whereas Foobar2000 does that.
Will it automatically embed these when you add a directory to iTunes with a folder.jpg image in it?
Been wondering this for a while as I've finally started trying to sort out my album art!
Cheers
Paul.
Will it automatically embed these when you add a directory to iTunes with a folder.jpg image in it?
Been wondering this for a while as I've finally started trying to sort out my album art!
Cheers
Paul.
No, Itunes will not do this. Itunes will see embedded art or it uses its own separate database/file system for the album art. But it does not see the folder.jpg in a directory. This is one reason why I simply embed all my album art in each file. foobar and itunes both see it, most (all?) other players see it, etc. And the argument that it wastes space doesn't move me, as the incremental space is trivial compared to the storage required for the files themselves.
Disk space is really not my problem. Let me rephrase myself.
I think embedding cover art is better (some think it's redundant, but I'm not worrying about little space overhead) because if you move just selected songs from album, iPod would display them correctly.
I'm just worrying, would some players have problem if in music folder exists non-music data, like folder.jpg.
It's not problem to me to do both, embed and put folder.jpg.
But I need to decide before reorganizing my music collection, cause it will save me a lot of time if I do it a proper way (and later not saying to myself:"Stupid,stupid,stupid me )"
Personally, I keep large 600x600 art in the album folder and embed smaller cover art in mp3s. I also keep additional art in the folder as I also like seeing the insides and backside of a song's CD.
Winamp will display album art stored as folder.jpg, cover.jpg, %album%.jpg or embedded in the tag. If you use the "Get Album Art" feature, it stores it as %album%.jpg.
(also .jpeg, .png, .gif or .bmp)
No, Itunes will not do this. Itunes will see embedded art or it uses its own separate database/file system for the album art. But it does not see the folder.jpg in a directory. This is one reason why I simply embed all my album art in each file. foobar and itunes both see it, most (all?) other players see it, etc. And the argument that it wastes space doesn't move me, as the incremental space is trivial compared to the storage required for the files themselves.
Bugger. Stupid iTunes. I guess I'll have to embed as well. As you say I think the biggest files I have for album art are less than 50K so not a great addition in terms of overall filesize.
I always embed my album art simply because that is the only way for it to show up on all my devices. I have an iPod, AppleTV, car CD deck, PS3, and a few other devices that support album art with my files but only if it is embedded. I use 500X500 jpeg images which increase my file sizes (sometimes) by less than 75k. A small price to play to have album art displayed on all of my devices. I could see how the folder.jpeg method would come in handy as you could have higher resolution (or less compressed) album art in a single file and just associate all the mp3s (or whatever) with it. I would use that method if iTunes and everything else I had supported it.
In my opinion it's wrong to embed album art. From a data structure view an album art is not a property of a track but a property of an entire album.
Not a track has got a CD cover but an entire album does. Embed it to tracks is redundancy.
If I would store my albums as single ape/flac... files + cue it is correct to embed an album art.
But I store my CDs as individual files in folders and so I only use the folder.jpg as album art.
I use Mediaportal http://www.team-mediaportal.com/ (http://www.team-mediaportal.com/) to listen to my albums on my HTPC and it handles folder.jpg just fine. I really do want album art there, because it gets displayed on a big LCD TV.
On my other devices (car radio, mobile devices...) I do not need it an thus do not care about it.
^^ same here
Also if you use the foobar ipod plugin it automatically transfers the folder.jpg to your ipod. It works and I don't believe it embeds the art to the mp3s. I guess it adds it to the ipod dbase.
In my opinion it's wrong to embed album art. From a data structure view an album art is not a property of a track but a property of an entire album.
Tell that to the hardware manufacturers who support only embedded album art. Although, I can think of one album that has different covers on a per-track basis. Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV was released (digitally by Trent) and each track had it's own album art. Each track had embedded album art as well. The album art was about 1-1.5MB in size. I cleared all the individual artwork and just used the main one when embedding for portable use (I looked up a new main artwork as well, one that was less than 50k). So that is an example of when embedding the artwork isn't redundant. It also happens to be the only album I can think of that does this.
In my opinion it's wrong to embed album art. From a data structure view an album art is not a property of a track but a property of an entire album.
Not a track has got a CD cover but an entire album does. Embed it to tracks is redundancy.
Not a track has got an album name but an entire album does.
Nevertheless, the album-it-came-from IS a property of a single song, and I'm betting you have the %album% field filled in in your tags. By this logic, you could consider album-art-from-the-album-it-came-from to be a property of a single song, similarly shared with other songs from that album the same as the standard %album% field.
So the main argument goes back to the redundancy of having the same image file embedded in multiple audio files, which has been mentioned many times in this thread.
If I ever get an iPod I'd use the foo_dop plugin which can deal with folder.jpg and add that album art to the iPod database. iTunes is annoying on so many levels, although I understand the reasons that people use it.
Does foo_dop support the iPhone?
The absolute surefire way to ensure your cover art displays is to embed directly in the file.
My paradigm is folder-per-album. As such, I only bother with files of album art. I get album art for free when tagging with foo_discogs. I'd never embed it, as I don't like big chunks of binary data in my tags. This approach works fine with foo_dop and my iPod Video.
I'm having an interesting issue with the Folder.jpg approach. Long ago, in the land before time, I used to use iTunes. I thought it was great that it was able to download album artwork, and I had no idea about embedding or anything else; I just knew it downloaded most of my artwork. I now use foobar and the Album Art Downloader to snag my album art, and I couldn't be happier. However, recently, while transferring my collection to my jump drive, I noticed it was transferring a lot of random files/folders such as AlbumArtwork13$97831 and random crap like that. I selected all the folders on the jump drive and checked the properties, and apparently I somehow had 3900 files even though I only have about 2000 songs and maybe 250 albums, so my max file count should have been something around 2300 in my mind. On top of that, I was unable to find any of the random folders/files it said it was transferring, and have been unable to find them on my computer as well. Now, before I get suggestions like "search hidden files/folders etc." let it be known I have done that.
And so my quest to get rid of all these random files begins. It began by clearing any and all embedded artwork from my files through Mp3tag, and just to be extra safe, I redownloaded iTunes to clear the artwork from my files through there as well. I then had Mp3tag reorganize my collection in a different directory with completely new folders so as to clear any artwork that was somehow still embedded in the folders but not present in the folder or mp3. I then proceeded to start copying my Folder.jpg artwork into the new directory, and noticed Windows is creating invisible files somewhere once I copy the Folder.jpg into the new directory. For example, one album I copied had 13 tracks and the Folder.jpg file for a total of 14 files. If I back out to the root artist folder, it is showing as 15 files with the invisible file taking up about an extra 600kb. I can now remove the Folder.jpg and the root artist folder will retain its picture (if I am viewing it thumbnail style). How do I make Windows stop creating duplicate images for all my albums and hiding them wherever they are?
An alternative to the folder.jpg setup in iTunes is to just embed the artwork into the first track of the album. It will display the artwork in iTunes for the entire album. I don't know if it will transfer that functionality to the iPod though.
I actually prefer to embed the album art, but I concede that the folder.jpg setup actually makes more sense.
It's a shame that iTunes doesn't support folder.jpg, or at least have some provision to add artwork to its database.
Having iTunes look for artwork for tracks ripped/encoded with other software is a complete joke!
@docnoq: it sounds like iTunes is/was only part of your problem with having lots of random files. The default behavior of Windows Media Player is to download album art and save four files per album (and per-folder if you have a given album's tracks spread through multiple folders). Folder.jpg, AlbumArt1234978.jpg, AlbumArtSmall123478.jpg (those number strings are random, fyi) and I think one other file. These are all set as hidden files and also classified as "system" files so that you have to answer "yes" whenever you delete them. The larger files are 200x200, there are two that are smaller 100x100 I think.
If this was your problem, you should change your windows explorer settings to show hidden files and show system files. And if Windows is downloading artwork automatically in the background, it's overwriting the (likely better-quality) Folder.jpg that you've downloaded painstakingly with Album Art Downloader. This is a pain.
You don't say what version of Windows you have. In Vista, WMP may be more integrated into Windows so that it runs in the background and does stuff even when you don't ask it to. I have XP, and WMP only runs if I start it manually.
However, even though I've disabled WMP from downloading info from the internet, every so often it grabs stupid little album-art stuff and overwrites my 600x600 Folder.jpg with a smaller 200x200 hidden-system file. So I just make sure to manually check all files whenever I sync to my external hard drive.
Does foo_dop support the iPhone?
I have not tested it myself. But according to the official site (http://yuo.be/ipod.php) it does. I quote:
MobileDeviceSign library; Required for iPhone/iPod touch 2.x software support. Extract to your main foobar2000 folder.
Intersting posts on the itunes thing.
Heres my take on it. I do use the folder.jpg system mostly. Occasionally I download music from emusic.com.
They provide album art as a jpg that comes along with the download and is stored in the album folder.
I used to wonder the same thing about itunes too... but when I import the album downloaded from emusic to itunes media player it recognizes the album art. It also shows up on the ipod when sync'd!'
So, I wonder if TimCuprey is right, that itunes recognizes it and saves it in some big directory (itunes xml file) somewhere?
Winamp also will read folder.jpg and when their art downloader is used will put a .jpg in the album folder. not embed it.
Like I said I like the folder.jpg but one drawback mentioned by someone in another post is that if you have a stereo or car audio player that shows artwork you would need that art embedded in the tag info to have it show up. A folder.jpg in that situation and your outta luck.
Either your tracks from emusic have embedded art in addition to the separate jpeg that comes with the download or iTunes is grabbing the artwork from the iTunes store.
iTunes does not do anything with external artwork files.
Occasionally I download music from emusic.com.
They provide album art as a jpg that comes along with the download and is stored in the album folder.
I used to wonder the same thing about itunes too... but when I import the album downloaded from emusic to itunes media player it recognizes the album art. It also shows up on the ipod when sync'd!'
eMusic has album art embedded in every mp3 file, as greynol suspected
thanks for clearing that up guys. sorry for the misinformation...
I think at one point in the past they did not embed artwork, but they must just add an additional jpg file as well for whatever reason now.
so goes my theory anyway, but if I could get winamp to act the way i wanted it with peripheral devices I would use it as my ipod but until then i'm stuck with itunes to sync with my ipod
@timcupery:
I am running XP (I very much dislike Vista). It's strange; I've had 'show hidden files and folders' ticked, and even turned it off and on again to make sure it was working, but the files are hidden elsewhere. They are not stored in My Music folder or any subfolder that I am aware of. I've even ran the search feature of XP with hidden files and folders included to try and find these hidden artwork files to no avail. Would using 'cover.jpg' as my artwork title prevent these things from happening? Also, it appears these hidden files have been created multiple times in some folders. I created a new directory, moved all my music to it, but kept the old directory in tact. In the old directory, I have gone through and checked some of the folders, and some artist folders have 15+ files in them with NO visible files at all (and I do have hidden files/folders on). This is getting rather irritating. I think I'll contact Microsoft and/or switch to just embedding artwork.
Edit: Well it appears contacting Microsoft is out of the question. Assholes trying to charge me $59.00 to talk with tech support when I have a legit copy of Windows? Wtf.
Folder Options -> Do not cache thumbnails
check this also:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=68178 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=68178)
Please refrain from interrupting discussions with requests for help that are not on-topic. If you want help from an individual user send a PM. This is a public forum.
Thanks; didn't even know that option existed. I have since taken several measures to counter this annoyance: I have reverted back to WMP 9 that came with XP to prevent WMP 11 from screwing over my covers, deleted my entire old structure and started anew, and have begun naming my art cover.jpg. And now with your handy suggestion, I have gone through and deleted all the Thumbs.db files that had started accumulating in my new structure. Hopefully all of this is enough to prevent Windows from adding hundreds of pointless files to my collection. Thanks all,
-Docnoq
another thing that you can do is, if you use a sync program, simply tell it not to copy any files named thumbs.db (I use filesync and this has a line for file types of filenames to exclude from the syncronization process)
hi,
i don't want to embed my folder.jpg into my mp3s but i also don't want them to be eaten by wmp.
does anybody know how i can "protect" them against wmp? My own solution would be to copy each folder.jpg to e.g. front.jpg or cover.jpg;
in the end i want to have two files in each folder: the original folder.jpg and the copy of it, e.g. front.jpg
is this a good and safe idea? if yes, how can i automatically do this (i only know "flex renamer" which only can rename but not copy files)?
thanks,
asnaeb1918
You can set them to 'read only'
for keeping folder.jpg files safe from WMP´s write-over, I just use my backups on an external hard drive. If a jpg file is newer, and way smaller (wmp uses 200x200), I´ll set it so the older one copies back. But this is some manual work. I rarely use wmp so it doesn´t much matter for me.
Is there any way to make foobar not to look for embedded art and just for external (in folder) art? I looked in the preferences but all I could find was to make it only look for embedded artwork.
Is there any way to make foobar not to look for embedded art and just for external (in folder) art? I looked in the preferences but all I could find was to make it only look for embedded artwork.
nope. it will use what it decides to be the best quality.
you could use mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) to find embedded album art should you wish to remove it. add your music folder and then use the filter dialog at the bottom of the screen.
%_covers% PRESENT
Oh, I did that but I have A LOT of files an embedded album art. Is there any way with this tag editor to mass remove it?
Yes, you can do this with the so called "Actions":
http://help.mp3tag.de/options_format.html#removedupes (http://help.mp3tag.de/options_format.html#removedupes)
Removing embedded cover art
Please use PICTURE as field name if you want to remove cover art from the tags.
Regards,
Quellcore
sir, you rule. The program even offered to remove the "read-only" setting on some files as it proceeded to delete the album covers
Glad it worked for you.
More than once i wanted to do some funky tag actions and Mp3tag provided me with the right tools.
Regards, Quellcore