Best choices for high-performance album artwork?

[DaveStewart]

Is there any difference in performance regarding linking to album art, or embedding it in the files, or anything else for that matter?

I'm trying to stick to 300x300 or 256x256, and I seem to have more consistent results if the artwork gets embedded in the files' tags.
However, I'm going through my pretty damn large collection at the moment (16000 songs) and I don't want to find at the end that I've made the wrong choice!

So far I'm about 1/3 of the way through, and I'm discovering that if I browse anything more than a page or so of albums, all the artwork can take quite a long time to appear, one by one. I was surprised as my machine has literally the best processor you can buy, and a bloody quick hard drive! Admittedly, my files are on the network, but it a Gigabit network, card, and switch.

So any advice on the best choices for performance (I'm not worried about file sizes, I've plenty of space) would be appreciated.

Many thanks,
Dave

[nohitter151]

There really aren't any differences in terms of performance, but saving your art externally will save you some hard drive space while saving to tags will take up a little bit more hard drive space.

IMO saving to tags is much easier and less of a hassle than saving art externally.

[Lowlander]

Embedding seems to result in less issues as the album art is always connected to the songs. Saving the album art externally this connection can be lost.

There is the Album Art Tagger script that can help you modify the album art in the future if so required.

[DaveStewart]

Ok, thanks for the input

[Breydel]

I'm playing on the safe side and use album art both for the ID3 tag and as a picture file in the folder. Who knows what future portable device I might play that can't process one or the other.

[Lowlander]

Take in account that MediaMonkey can either embed or save album art externally or both when synchronizing which means you can save album art in any way you wish in your library.

[DaveStewart]

In the next MM update, would it be possible to improve the display performance of album artwork?

When you scroll, it does take a few seconds to actually display the artwork of the albums that actually scroll into view.
It strikes me that it could be made quicker by:

- preloading artwork when clicking on nodes that display more than one album
- maybe searching for artwork in only the first track (then falling back to other tracks if needed)
- caching artwork locally if necessary

I'm sure MM does some good things under the bonnet anyway, but it just feels very sluggish when you flip through and have to wait for things to update. Cached webpages don't do this, so I don't see why MM should.

Cheers,
Dave

[nohitter151]

In the next MM update, would it be possible to improve the display performance of album artwork?

When you scroll, it does take a few seconds to actually display the artwork of the albums that actually scroll into view.
It strikes me that it could be made quicker by:

- preloading artwork when clicking on nodes that display more than one album
- maybe searching for artwork in only the first track (then falling back to other tracks if needed)
- caching artwork locally if necessary

I'm sure MM does some good things under the bonnet anyway, but it just feels very sluggish when you flip through and have to wait for things to update. Cached webpages don't do this, so I don't see why MM should.

Cheers,
Dave

1. MM already only shows art for albums from the first available track of the album
2. MM already uses a temporary cache to speed up the art views
3. Supposedly the performance of the art views has been improved already in the 3.1 beta version

[DaveStewart]

3. Supposedly the performance of the art views has been improved already in the 3.1 beta version

Well that sounds very hopeful! I realise that it's impossible for the MM team to update everything at once, but that would certainly be a nice improvement

Thanks for replying.

[nolabar10der]

I found this while searching to make sure I didn't double-thread the topic. Timely thread! Anyway, is there some way that I can move the MM cache from the temp. location? I've noticed that MM does a admirable job of reloading the gazillion albums' art from a cold start as long as I haven't a) rebooted or, b) run an app like CCleaner to purge the temps. Winamp, by comparison, seems to load the art almost instantaneously under all circumstances. Of course, I'm a MM guy so I was hoping for a similar functionality

Regards,

Brian

PS - I know that it can be done, as it's listed as a #4844 as a fix or improvement. Just can't figure out how.

[nohitter151]

I found this while searching to make sure I didn't double-thread the topic. Timely thread! Anyway, is there some way that I can move the MM cache from the temp. location? I've noticed that MM does a admirable job of reloading the gazillion albums' art from a cold start as long as I haven't a) rebooted or, b) run an app like CCleaner to purge the temps. Winamp, by comparison, seems to load the art almost instantaneously under all circumstances. Of course, I'm a MM guy so I was hoping for a similar functionality

Regards,

Brian

PS - I know that it can be done, as it's listed as a #4844 as a fix or improvement. Just can't figure out how.

I don't think that the cache location is configurable. 4844 just fixed a bug where sometimes users had their art caches being made right in the root C:\ drive instead of the Temp directory.

[nolabar10der]

PS - I know that it can be done, as it's listed as a #4844 as a fix or improvement. Just can't figure out how.

I don't think that the cache location is configurable. 4844 just fixed a bug where sometimes users had their art caches being made right in the root C:\ drive instead of the Temp directory.

Aaargh! Thanks for the reply, though! I have this new, ultra-p*mp 24" monitor and all of that album art looks soooo cool when it's spread out like that. Eh, browsing in the tree is far quicker, I suppose.

[nohitter151]

Aaargh! Thanks for the reply, though! I have this new, ultra-p*mp 24" monitor and all of that album art looks soooo cool when it's spread out like that. Eh, browsing in the tree is far quicker, I suppose.

The beta versions has some performance improvements in the art views, I'm using it and don't have any problems with it - though this probably will vary from computer to computer based on its specs. Mine isn't anything special, though.

[Lowlander]

Tools > Options > General's Temp Directory is the folder for cached album art if I'm not mistaken. You can configure it to any location.

[nohitter151]

Tools > Options > General's Temp Directory is the folder for cached album art if I'm not mistaken. You can configure it to any location.

You're right, my mistake. Sorry about that!