Page 1 of 1

Help me understand album art

Posted: Mon Aug 12, 2013 1:33 am
by tppytel
I get that album art is one of those places where proprietary differences make everything complicated, but I'm hoping not to waste a bunch of time doing this the wrong way and could use some guidance. I want to tag a bunch of FLAC's and MP3's in such a way that they'll work correctly with MM, with my iPod (a recent Classic model), and probably with a Sonos setup in the future. I don't expect to use any other devices in the foreseeable future. I haven't yet synced up my iPod because I don't want to break anything that I had done previously through iTunes.

All my art is front cover art - I don't need multiple files. Do I want to tag the art as "front cover" or as unspecified/other? Or both? Does it matter? Will MP3Tag do this in the same way as MM? Do I need the "folder.jpeg" file in my album folders? Is that the correct filename to use? In general, what do I want to be doing for maximum compatibility, so that I'm least likely to end up fetching album art all over again in the future?

A good link is just as welcome as direct advice. Everything I've Googled up so far has been very specific to a particular environment and hasn't explained what's supposed to happen or how to work around different players.

Re: Help me understand album art

Posted: Mon Aug 12, 2013 11:51 am
by Lowlander
I prefer to embed Artwork instead of maintaining separate image files (folder.jpg). The reason being that with embedded Artwork you should never loose the Artwork association with the file (no matter what folder/file structure you use). The drawback is that it requires more storage space as each track will have the Artwork saved in it.

Most devices can work with embedded Artwork and on sync you can have it extracted as external Artwork on the device if required. I'm not certain what Sonos supports, you should check their documentation.

I've never seen any issues reported with setting the front cover as front cover.

Re: Help me understand album art

Posted: Mon Aug 12, 2013 1:55 pm
by tppytel
OK, thanks. It looks like Sonos supports embedded art up to 1024x1024, which is way higher than I'd use anyway. So just embedding the front cover image should work fine for my purposes. I wish I knew that iTunes had a nonstandard album art scheme before I spent so much time cleaning up my library last summer, though.

I was also getting all confused for a while due to some plain old stupidity on my part. I usually grab art around 500x500 if I can find it, but was seeing a bunch of 225x225's (in the embedded art) when I clicked Artwork Properties. I was trying to figure out if MM was downscaling it somewhere, but eventually realized I'm just dumb... right-click copying directly from a Google Images search is copying the thumbnail at 225x225, not the original. You need to click it first to get the full-res image. D'oh!

Pretty sure I'm all sorted out now.