ajdedo wrote:
1) Will most players shrink and stretch Art Work to fill the screen size?
2) Is it better to embed Art work in the ID3Tag, or leave it in the folder?
3) If not, what is the best standard Dimension for Art Work?
1) AFAIK, all 'iDevices' will manage any image size fine. On the other hand, from my experience I can say that cell phones based on Symbian OS can't show Album Art if filesize exceeds 100KB. I can't say nothing about Android devices on this matter...
2) Looking only from MediaMonkey point of view, I think there's no difference. But if you embed a large image file in every track of an album, you'll end up wasting a considerable storage space. Maybe it's not a big issue if you have lots of terabytes in some NAS storage, but it IS an issue in a small 2GB device.
3) I think 600x600* is a nice standard for all my current use (I mean: an iPod 5G and MediaMonkey itself with MonkeyFlow add-on sometimes running fullscreen at a 1680x1050 monitor). So, I use the following approach:
- ONE image file stored in the album folder as 'Front.jpg'** in the biggest resolution I can find (at a maximum of 1500x1500), just to guarantee my album art is future proof.
- The same 'Front.jpg' resized to 600x600 and stored in tags. Normally, these resized images will have 200KB or less, so I don't waste too much space storing then in each track.
* A very nice place to find album art is
http://www.albumartexchange.com. Their 'standard' size is 600x600, but recent submissions are also being uploaded in 800x800 and 1000x1000 resolutions, which is great. As a side note, I'm a regular uploader there.
** I advise you not to store your images as 'Folder.jpg' if you plan also to store them in tags, because if you do this AND eventually you use Windows Media Player, it will overwrite your nice, hi-res 'Folder.jpg' images with lo-res, over-compressed versions created from those stored in tags. Yeah, it already happened to me. Fortunately, I had a backup...