Lossless + Album Art? Options

[hermes_vb]

Hi. I'm looking for a lossless format that support album art. My current lossless codec is FLAC, and I love it, but now I have an iPod and have been transcoding to M4A. I downloaded a trial version of Tag&Remane and was able to add album art to M4A files. I also kept a copy of the album arts in case I can find a lossless format that supports it. Any help will be appreciated.

PS I'm NOT interested in saving a single JPG image in a folder like most people do. I want it embeded per track. I have a huge Hard Disk and I'm willing to use it...LOL

This post has been edited by hermes_vb: Oct 24 2006, 22:40

[bhoar]

The new FLAC 1.1.3 now supports art in a new PICTURE block:

http://flac.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*.../changelog.html

CODE

PICTURE: This block is for storing pictures associated with the file, most commonly cover art from CDs. There may be more than one PICTURE block in a file. The picture format is similar to the APIC frame in ID3v2. The PICTURE block has a type, MIME type, and UTF-8 description like ID3v2, and supports external linking via URL (though this is discouraged). The differences are that there is no uniqueness constraint on the description field, and the MIME type is mandatory. The FLAC PICTURE block also includes the resolution, color depth, and palette size so that the client can search for a suitable picture without having to scan them all.

At some point, applications will begin supporting the new block, I would presume.

-brendan

This post has been edited by bhoar: Oct 24 2006, 23:04

[grommet]

Since you're playing with Apple now... Apple Lossless (ALAC) supports embedded Album Art, since it uses the same .M4A container. (WMA Lossless does, too, but that's useless for this discussion.)

Yes, FLAC will support it now/soon -- but I'm not sure how long it will be before it's widely adopted in applications.

This post has been edited by grommet: Oct 24 2006, 23:25

[hermes_vb]

Thanks for the replies. I guess I'm gonna check the new FLAC. I kinda suspected Apple Lossless did the trick, but I don't use iTunes at all. I do my ripping to FLAC using CDex 1.70 and use Anapod Explorer as my loading interface. I just bought the iPod for the AAC playability.

This post has been edited by hermes_vb: Oct 25 2006, 01:17