I've been gradually encoding my wife's music to iTunes *.m4a, and adding artwork to the songs, since she seems to enjoy it. My own preference for audio playback is Winamp (and yes, I am well aware of foobar2000), and I wonder whether there is currently any way to display the cover artwork embedded in an *.m4a while playing via Winamp? All of the cover plugins I've seen so far rely on images embedded in ID3v2 tags, or separate image files stored within the same folder as the music.

My thought - if it hasn't already been suggested and nixed! - is that it might be useful (all right, not terribly useful... but it would still be interesting) if the AudioCoding.com MPEG-4 General Audio player/plugin could be adapted to show cover art, if/when desired.

Of course, if there is already an existing cover plugin which correctly handles iTunes *.m4a audio with embedded artwork, please mention it!

Thank you,
- M.

Still curious about whether this could be done, if anyone has any thoughts. I've not yet found a Winamp plugin that accomodates iTunes *.m4a with covers (the AudioCoding.com plugin plays the music fine, but still has no way to display artwork).

- M.

you'd have better luck finding some help on this in the winamp forums

mp4 offers to attach anything in it via the "udta" (user data) atom, if someone wants to create a plugin which allows to attach covers in the file than it will have to use this way of storing
it would definitely be a nice idea

also note that you can place jpg and png files in the mp4 file as own picture track (similar to a audio or video track)
that would be the second possibility and you can already store jpg/png files this way in mp4 with the mp4box tool

note that of course you will need to use a player which handles jpg/png streams embedded in mp4, the osmo4 player from gpac should handle it already
and also i wouldnt use the .m4a extension for such a file anymore, as .m4a means aac-audiostream only