This feature request is prompted by my experiences with the new Sony NW-ZX100 walkman.
This device only appears to support 'baseline' mode JPEGs for Album Art. It only has a 400x240 pixel display, and can only display one image per track. (As we know, MediaMonkey supports embedding multiple images per track).
Sony's own librarian software, Media Go, appears to modify the embedded Album Art in files when syncing from a library to the walkman. This includes converting 'progressive'-mode JPEGs to baseline mode, and further compressing them (maybe resampling them to match the display size too - I haven't confirmed this latter one yet).
It struck me that this actually makes a lot of sense.
For instance, I have a BIG library (about 16,500 tracks) and have a 200GB microSD card in my walkman.
Probably a lot of the Album Art in my library is substantially bigger than 400x240 pixels, and a substantial proportional of tracks have multiple images embedded.
Let's estimate that there might be on average 50KB of wasted excess file size per track, due to oversize or multiple Album Art images.
50KB x 16,500 = about 800MB of wasted space ... let's round it up to a Gigabyte.
I'd rather save that space and use it for more (lossless) audio.
On the other hand, I don't want to skimp on the quality of Album Art in my library itself.
So, how about having as customizable 'optimize album art' feature in MediaGo for when syncing to a portable device?
Similar to what Sony MediaGo seems to do, but explicit and configurable (or at least you can turn it off to make syncing faster). It could:
- losslessly change Album Art to supported image file formats (eg PNG to baseline JPEG)
- it could re-sample to a pixel size to match the device display (eg 1200x1200 to 240x240 for this device)
- and it could recompress the image to a smaller size if it is above a certain threshold file size (eg cap at 100KB or something like that)
I think this would be useful for cramming big libraries onto devices whilst we wait for vendors to finally come out with those fabled 512TB microSD cards.
It wouldn't make the artwork look any worse on the target portable device,
and of course the original album art in your main library wouldn't be altered.
Option to optimise Album Art for target device when syncing
Moderator: Gurus