1000x1000 pixel album art, what is the best approach for your collection. Options

[krafty]

I always go to albumartexchange.com to get my CD covers (followed an advice from someone here in the forum), because no matter what I do I can't get them scanned as perfect.
But I have been noticing that there has been a booming inscrease on average art size. The site started with 600 px, then 800 px, and now it's not uncommon to find your favourite cover with 1000px and way over 1MB, in a very perfect scanned way, of course.

In this situation, what to do?

Is it still a smart move to embed covers like this in your audio files?
I have heard that this may be a great disavantage for portable devices, which eventually choke with such huge art size. However this art size is not daunting to modern computing, as images do eventually need more resolution to look perfect, and computers are faster. Is it better to keep the 1000px in its own file "front.jpg" and leave the audio alone? Or perhaps embed 600px images and keep a higher resolution in the album directory? And where there are several tracks from several albums inside the same folder?

What do you guys think about this?

This post has been edited by krafty: Mar 27 2011, 02:16

[WonderSlug]

It doesn't make much sense to embed a 1000x1000 album art image into a MP3 file for use on a portable player with what, a 3" inch screen. Not when it can be 1 MB or more in size. Even using with a PC software player like Foobar, it's somewhat overkill, because the album art is usually displayed in a small window.

What I usually do is keep the very large image as an archival reference image and resample/resize it to 600x600 and 300x300 using an image manipulator like Irfanview or GIMP. The 600x600 image is about 128 KB to 200 KB and I put it the same folder as the music as "cover.jpg" or "front.jpg", whatever.

I then have the much smaller ~32kb 300x300 image embedded as part of the MP3s if needed. That way, at most it adds an additional 500 KB per album (given at most 15 or 16 songs per album). It would take about 2000 albums, or 30000 songs, of this to reach an additional 1 GB of storage consumed by embedded 300x300 album art.

This post has been edited by WonderSlug: Mar 27 2011, 04:27

[Northpack]

It would be the perfect absurdity to encode an album as MP3 and then embed 1MB of redundant cover art into each file

Personally I don't care much about the cover art on the computer and go with the usual 500-600px folder.jpg, if any. Whenever I want to savour the music in all it's aspects I take the physical album at hands. After all, the cover artwork is just one single (and not very informative) page of the booklet.

This post has been edited by Northpack: Mar 27 2011, 08:24

[krafty]

What about FLAC? Is it still reasonable to embed 1MB-2MB images in FLAC files?
For example, to play in iPod 120 GB Classic, with Rockbox...

[Zarggg]

I generally store a 1000x1000 (Or larger if I'm feeling lazy, or smaller if I cannot find an image that large) as a separate file in my album directories and resize a copy to 600x600 when I add to my iPod.

[cyberdux]

1000 x 1000 works beautifully on my iPad. . .

[krafty]

Anyone experiencing issues with iPod Classic 30/80/120 GB using Rockbox with FLAC + huge album art?

[Eli]

has anyone found an easy way to resample large album art to a smaller size when transcoding from flac to mp3 or aac?

[Zarggg]

Not in foobar2000 or mp3tag. I'm not personally aware of any tag editors that also do image resizing/scaling, because that generally requires a decent graphics library. Any that do would likely use linear interpolation (possibly bilinear, which is slightly better).

[Eli]

would be nice if foobar could call up gimp. I don't know if there is a command line interface for doing something like this in gimp.

[krafty]

would be nice if foobar could call up gimp. I don't know if there is a command line interface for doing something like this in gimp.

GIMP supports scripts and I believe there is a way to do this, yes... it could be done from command line.

[flaminio]

has anyone found an easy way to resample large album art to a smaller size when transcoding from flac to mp3 or aac?

Xrecode II can resize artwork while transcoding from flac to mp3.

[SamDeRe81]

I use to collect album art for the CD's until it became so insane I gave up, even scanning my own art didn't guarantee quality. A micro scratch becomes huge after a scan lol But I prefer the simple iTunes Album Art, much faster and easier honestly. I use to have a script from Doug's Apple Scripts that would embed the cover art image into the audio file, however I'm on Linux now so don't use it. But that would be my choice for getting artwork.

[spoon]

has anyone found an easy way to resample large album art to a smaller size when transcoding from flac to mp3 or aac?

As I am quite sure you have dBpoweramp... there is the ID Tag Processing DSP which can set a maximum size for the art.

[WonderSlug]

What about FLAC? Is it still reasonable to embed 1MB-2MB images in FLAC files?
For example, to play in iPod 120 GB Classic, with Rockbox...

Why?

The screen resolution of the iPod Classic is 320x240. Pretty much anything over 300x300 is quite unnecessary. You won't be seeing the extra resolution that 600x600 or 1000x1000 gives. But, the extra 15 MB per album by using 1000x1000 is quite noticeable on your diminishing storage space.

[Eli]

has anyone found an easy way to resample large album art to a smaller size when transcoding from flac to mp3 or aac?

As I am quite sure you have dBpoweramp... there is the ID Tag Processing DSP which can set a maximum size for the art.

Thanks, didn't realize that. What is dbpoweramp using to do the resizing? I have noticed that some times when it decreases the resolution, the kb of the saved image actually go up. Haven't tried with the DSP, but noticed this behavior in the cd ripper. Would it be possible to have gimp called up or some other more efficient image software?

This post has been edited by Eli: Apr 2 2011, 19:05

[Zarggg]

The screen resolution of the iPod Classic is 320x240. Pretty much anything over 300x300 is quite unnecessary. You won't be seeing the extra resolution that 600x600 or 1000x1000 gives.

Are you positive? I used to use 300x300 images on my old iPod 5.5G, but on my iPod 6G (Classic), I've noticed that graphics of that size are considerably blocky in the "random album art" animation on the main menu compared to 600x600 images.

This post has been edited by Zarggg: Apr 4 2011, 02:46

[spoon]

> I have noticed that some times when it decreases the resolution, the kb of the saved image actually go up.

You could have a 2000x2000 pixel compressed JPEG, compressed at a high factor (say 9 in photoshop), it might be ~200KB. Now if dBpoweramp resizes it to 500x500 and saves it with a lower compression factor (say 1) then yes the size could go upto 800KB even though the image is smaller.

[Jedi82]

What about FLAC? Is it still reasonable to embed 1MB-2MB images in FLAC files?
For example, to play in iPod 120 GB Classic, with Rockbox...

Why?

The screen resolution of the iPod Classic is 320x240. Pretty much anything over 300x300 is quite unnecessary. You won't be seeing the extra resolution that 600x600 or 1000x1000 gives. But, the extra 15 MB per album by using 1000x1000 is quite noticeable on your diminishing storage space.

ok but what about if, in a near future, new portable players will support larger screen or larger resolution? Having a nice 600x600 cover embed in the mp3 files will be just fine no?
Or maybe i can think like this: my HD is barely full of space, i take my album, save on my desktop the 600x600 embed artwork (so that my album will decrease a lot in MB), resize it to 300x300 et voila...without search for a new and lighr artwork!

[Northpack]

ok but what about if, in a near future, new portable players will support larger screen or larger resolution?

Sure, noone knows what the future may bring. Why not MP3 players with a 15" HD screen (and new trousers with the appropriate pockets)?

[LosMintos]

What do you guys think about this?

I scan covers with 300 dpi and put the files beside the music (same folder). I do not embed these images. Additionally, I scan the front cover with 150 dpi for embedding. These files are about 700 px squared and appr. 300 kB of size.

[d_headshot]

Is 600x600 roughly the same size as the cover art for a standard CD case?

[Wombat]

Is 600x600 roughly the same size as the cover art for a standard CD case?

Depends on the dpi, so if it has 125dpi it is the right size

[onkl]

If you scan covers with 300dpi or more you probably just make the printing grid visible which is hard to remove afterwards and often creates moiré effects. So unless you have access to a digital copy (like itunes) the higher resolution shouldn't offer more information/quality unless you care for delicious dirt and pubic hairs from the scanner surface.

This post has been edited by onkl: Aug 29 2011, 09:11

[smok3]

ok but what about if, in a near future, new portable players will support larger screen or larger resolution?

Sure, noone knows what the future may bring. Why not MP3 players with a 15" HD screen (and new trousers with the appropriate pockets)?

lmao

using a calc found here http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/HDT...uide_page1.html
where i took that screen size is 3.2 inch and my viewing distance should be around (min) 0.4 m (1.3 feet) i get 500x500 px result.

When inputing 1000x1000 px, my viewing distance would be around 0.2 m, which is a kissing distance, and i'am not that close with my android. So i deduce that 500 x 500 px would be ideal in my case (and if such files are consumed only on this specific portable device)




edit: I have ignored the actual device resolution.
edit2: for an ipad2 with 9.7 inch display one might be happy with 1200x1200 px watching from 0.4 m or 500x500 px watching from 1.2 m.
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what would be wrong with '2000x2000 px folder.jpg' and '500x500 px each file has' it approach?

This post has been edited by smok3: Aug 29 2011, 11:08