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Topic: Quickest method for adding padding? (Read 4322 times) previous topic - next topic
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Quickest method for adding padding?

I've ripped each of my albums to a single FLAC file and they are all stored on a NAS.  When I add an album cover to a FLAC file with MP3Tag, the process take around 20 minutes for a single album.  As I understand it, this is because the entire file has to be rewritten, so it's being copied from the NAS to the PC, then back from the PC to the NAS.

I have 310 albums to add art to, and waiting 20 minutes before I can add a cover to the next album will be torturous.

Would the method of least effort to add art to these albums be to copy them to my main PC, then add the padding usng a bat file (Windows), before adding the artwork with MP3Tag and copying them back to the NAS?  I don't care that it will take hours to copy them to my PC so long as I don't have to supervise it during this time

Also, would it be unreasonable or problematic to add 1MB of padding?  My album covers are unlikely to exceed 150KB, but I don't want to get caught with this problem again, and 1MB added to a 350MB file really isn't that much.

Quickest method for adding padding?

Reply #1 –
Quote from: microUgly on
Also, would it be unreasonable or problematic to add 1MB of padding?  My album covers are unlikely to exceed 150KB, but I don't want to get caught with this problem again, and 1MB added to a 350MB file really isn't that much.


Yes, that's the quickest way. If you don't plan to change the album art you could skip the padding and process all files with mp3tag on your local PC and then copy them back to NAS.

Off-topic: ape tags (used by wavpack, ape, tak) don't suffer from this problem, because they are stored at the end of the file and no overwriting is required.

Quickest method for adding padding?

Reply #2 –
by default, padding should have been added, usually 64k for albums.  if you can fit in that, you can save yourself the time.

Quickest method for adding padding?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: jcoalson on
by default, padding should have been added, usually 64k for albums.  if you can fit in that, you can save yourself the time.

I could compress the images, but I've copied the files across to my PC now, so the only time and effort required now is to copy them back... which may take many hours but I can live with it

And since i'm half way there now, I might as well give the padding a hefty boost and be done with it.  I'm hoping I can do it as simply as:
[font= "Courier New"]metaflac --add-padding=1048576 *.flac[/font]
as opposed to listing every file (I'm on windows and can't pipe )

Quickest method for adding padding?

Reply #4 –
If you've copied the files to your PC why do you need to add padding and then add artwork? Doesn't adding the artwork add the padding anyways just in one step?
 

Quickest method for adding padding?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: probedb on
If you've copied the files to your PC why do you need to add padding and then add artwork? Doesn't adding the artwork add the padding anyways just in one step?

This is valid argument if you assume you'll never change the metadata in a way that would cause it to grow.  I'd rather assume that I might add more, and if I do I don't want to have to copy across 110GB of FLAC files to my main PC again.  So I'm taking the opportunity to add a generous amount of padding now.